Instead, what if it's a mindset: Doing such things, and 1000 others, some of them vastly more important than others.
And you can add to the list (instead of just saying "it won't work").
E.g. high car gas taxes, so there'll be trains, buses and bike lanes instead for everyone.
The whole point of a capitalist economy is to “route around inefficiency”, in the same way the internet is designed to “route around damage”. Any single player or even a large contingent of players, who act inefficiently, are only increasing the alpha available for another player to exploit.
“Inefficiency” in this sense is anything that doesn’t maximize personal benefit - profit or other quality of life. Anything that is legal according to the rules of the game (or tolerated by society) is going to happen whether it’s you that does it or someone else.
The only long term solution is that if this is what needs to happen, we have to encode that into “the rules” so everyone plays by that rule. Personal recycling or personal consumption reduction does nothing at a social level, and in fact is pushed as a deliberate stalling tactic to avoid and stall those political actions which could have a real impact.
This is also the problem with bitcoin - any one player choosing not to participate in mining only increases the reward for the remaining players who will continue to participate. If there is only one person on the planet willing to mine, she gets all the rewards. So simply choosing not to mine does nothing, you’re just transferring profit to someone else.
Humanity has already built the first AIs, they are emergent paperclip-maximizers encoded into the bylaws of corporations and market structures. And they will route around any attempt to un-maximize paperclip production according to whatever levers we continue to give them. If you don’t want people to eat as much beef, you have to build that rule into the system, it’ll never happen due to personal-level changes in behavior.
Governments can alter the rules of the game we play and they are (indirectly) controlled by us, as least in democractic countries.
however, you have to really change the rules of the game for everyone, such that consumption is actually substantially curtailed. even with a country-level tax, you're only making it cheaper for other countries who don't care. We saw this play out with Russian oil last year - banning it from the West didn't make it go away, it just made it cheaper for certain other states to import it. The commodity market is global.
(We can certainly enforce these kinds of rules globally when there is political will to do so - Iran sanctions are one example. If you do business with Iran, you won't do business with anyone who uses SWIFT, or anyone who does business with anyone who uses SWIFT. A line is drawn between the "sanctions-compliant" world and the "sanctions-non-compliant" world and it's generally extremely effective such that smuggling incidents are international news.)
The fundamental point I'm trying to make here is the "capitalism routes around inefficiency/morality". That's what it's designed to do, in the same way the internet routes around infrastructure damage (or censorship etc, which is fundamentally infrastructure damage). By taking a moral stand, you only increase the alpha available for other players to exploit.
These "individual moralistic stand" approaches like personal-scale recycling are inherently less effective than taxing producers, or outright bans. The reason they are pushed is because they are ineffective, and because they stall out the political will to adopt real solutions that would be effective.
That doesn't make any sense why would we make sacrifices that are not important.
