Do we have a moral responsibility to reduce our personal carbon emissions?

In much of European progressive culture, the idea that individual consumption choices carry moral weight has long ceased to be a proposition requiring argument. It has become, for many, simply taken for granted.

I know this milieu from the inside. For many years my professional life took me through the world of green NGOs, and the conversations I encountered there were genuinely well-intentioned, if sometimes revealing in unexpected ways. Colleagues would explain, with evident care, that they allowed themselves one transatlantic flight every four years, and offset the flight by normally taking the train for European travel — as though life were a carbon ledger requiring regular balancing. When I worked for WWF in the UK about 20 years ago, the organisation had just launched an online personal carbon calculator. I remember a colleague saying that she was allowed to have a slightly higher carbon footprint as an adult because she had not flown at all as a child. The accumulated restraint of her youth, she felt, had earned her a modest credit she could now spend.

The impulse behind it was a genuine attempt to take personal responsibility seriously. The difficulty is that the culture this impulse helped create has, over time, hardened into something more uncomfortable. The way you travel, where you live and what you eat are no longer merely practical choices, but moral statements that require justification. And there is a certain irony in the fact that those most engaged with this culture of ecological self-scrutiny tend, by virtue of their relative prosperity and mobile lives, to have some of the higher personal carbon footprints. They are not hypocrites exactly — they are people caught in a genuine tension between values and circumstances, a tension that the current moral framing does little to resolve.

Is there actually a personal moral obligation to reduce one’s carbon emissions — or is the culture of individual climate responsibility doing more harm than good, morally and practically? This is a contested question in contemporary environmental ethics, and it has found a sharp and rigorous interrogator in Frauke Rostalski, a German law professor and member of the German Ethics Council. In her 2025 book Wer soll was tun? — roughly, Who Should Do What? — Rostalski argues that Europeans are not, in fact, morally obliged to change their lifestyles to reduce carbon emissions. Her argument largely confirms positions I have argued in earlier essays. But it also opens a door onto a complementary tradition of ecological thinking that takes us somewhere rather different.

What Rostalski calls “moral capital” is very much at stake in all of this. The philosopher Philipp Hübl, in his 2024 book Moralspektakel, describes how individual moral self-presentation functions as a form of status competition — a way of accumulating social power through visible virtue. Nowhere is this more apparent than in the domain of sustainability, where the right consumer choices have become markers of class and belonging. The problem is not only that this culture is socially divisive and frequently performative. It is that it actively misdirects attention from the collective action failures that actually matter. The guilt, the peer pressure, the endless private negotiation about whether one is living sustainably enough: all of this comes at a real human cost, and produces, at the level of the global climate, essentially nothing.

And when private virtue fails to deliver results, the logic of the situation pushes toward a more coercive conclusion. If individuals cannot be shamed into sufficient compliance, perhaps they can be compelled. This is not a hypothetical concern. Proposals for personal carbon allowances, and in more extreme versions the coupling of carbon rationing with central bank digital currencies, are already in circulation in policy circles. The digital surveillance of consumption behaviour represents not a solution to the climate problem but a new and troubling iteration of the same technocratic impulse — the belief that the complexity of human life can be optimised from above, regardless of what people actually want or value.

Rostalski’s argument is rooted in legal reasoning applied to moral philosophy. As a professor of criminal law and legal philosophy at the University of Cologne, she applies to climate ethics a principle central to jurisprudence: that an obligation to act exists only when that action is genuinely capable of producing the intended result. A measure must be suitable and proportionate before it can legitimately bind anyone. An obligation to do something futile is, in this framework, no obligation at all.

Applied to climate change, the argument is familiar to anyone who has spent time thinking seriously about collective action problems. The Paris Agreement of 2015 is not, in any functionally meaningful sense, working. Its targets are voluntary, its enforcement mechanisms toothless, and major emitting nations have repeatedly revised their commitments. Even if every European citizen adopted a rigorously low-carbon lifestyle tomorrow, global emissions would continue rising. The EU has reduced its share of global emissions from around 15% in 1990 to roughly 6% today. China alone now accounts for more than 30% of global emissions, and India’s are rising rapidly as its economy grows. Europe’s sacrifice, undertaken unilaterally, cannot move these numbers.

Rostalski goes further and identifies specific mechanisms by which individual European restraint can be actively counterproductive. She points to leakage effects: when European countries impose strict emissions regulations, energy-intensive industries relocate to countries with laxer rules and often emit more than before. She also identifies what economists call the waterbed effect: when Europeans reduce demand for fossil fuels, lower prices simply stimulate consumption elsewhere. As the economist Hans-Werner Sinn has argued, unilateral national action to reduce consumption of internationally traded commodities like oil and gas is essentially self-defeating: the market price falls, and other parts of the world consume more.

A common response to these arguments is the claim that Europe — and Germany in particular — can ‘lead by example’: that even if the direct emissions impact is modest, the willingness to act demonstrates what is possible and will catalyse others to follow. It is a genuinely seductive argument, and one that has carried real weight in European policy circles for two decades. The evidence for it, however, is thin to the point of vanishing. Outside Europe, the large emitters — China, India, the United States — show no signs of following Germany’s lead. On the contrary, China approved the large-scale construction of coal-fired power plants in 2024 at the highest rate in nearly a decade. Germany, meanwhile, is now widely seen across Asia and beyond not as an inspiring model but as a cautionary tale of deindustrialisation and energy dysfunction — precisely the opposite of what the ‘lead by example’ thesis predicts.

This leads Rostalski to a distinction, borrowed from Max Weber, between two ethical traditions. Gesinnungsethik, the ethics of conviction, judges actions by their alignment with principle, regardless of consequence. Verantwortungsethik, the ethics of responsibility, judges actions by their actual results. The moralising culture around individual carbon choices is, she argues, a textbook case of the former — it confers righteousness while producing nothing for the atmosphere. Worse, it deepens social division, creating a culture of mutual judgment that makes the political cooperation required for effective action harder to achieve. Telling people they have a personal moral duty to make sacrifices while failing to build effective international frameworks is not a moral position — it is a displacement of institutional failure onto private conscience.

Rostalski is not arguing that climate change is unimportant, or that nothing should be done. Her argument is precisely about who should do what. Her answer is unambiguous: the responsibility lies with states and international institutions, not individual consumers.

Her positive proposal centres on the concept of a “climate club” — an idea developed by economists including Nobel laureate William Nordhaus. A coalition of industrialised nations would agree on a common carbon price, creating a level playing field that eliminates the competitive disadvantage of acting responsibly. Crucially, the club would impose tariffs at its borders on goods from non-participating countries, giving free-riders a powerful economic incentive to join. As membership grew, the incentive structure would gradually extend to the entire global economy. This is the only architecture that satisfies her core requirement: binding, enforceable, internationally coordinated, with real consequences for defection.

She is equally clear about the proper relationship between state and citizen: once effective norms exist, citizens owe compliance. But demanding lifestyle changes before the structural framework exists is, in her view, both logically incoherent and politically corrosive. A government that moralises about citizens’ holiday flights and dietary choices while failing to build effective international institutions deserves less the mantle of moral leadership than the charge of bad faith.

Where I want to go beyond Rostalski is not in disagreeing with her analysis, but in suggesting that her framework, for all its rigour, leaves something important out of view. Her argument is consequentialist and institutionalist: it asks what a functioning international regime would require of individuals once in place. This is the right question for policy. But it is not the only question worth asking.