Impotent moralistic scolding is a favorite pasttime of philosophers, but when it comes to something like climate change, it's particularly absurd, as philosopher Steven Hales (Bloomsburg) argues (link now fixed):

We like to believe that when it comes to the great global issues of our time—climate change, pollution, poverty, mass extinction—that we each can make a difference. A small one maybe, but a real and significant difference, nonetheless. If we don’t try, or don’t try hard enough, we should feel culpable, and we have a concomitant moral responsibility to shame our lazy neighbors who refuse to make an effort. That’s a mistake. It not only makes us guilt-ridden and worse off psychologically, but even more harmfully it also provides only the illusion of effective action, thereby allowing global problems to fester without a proper solution.

Even professional ethicists are largely getting this wrong. I recently attended an international ethics conference, and the overwhelming take-away was the realization that philosophical ethics remains obsessed with individuals—trolley cases, what you should do, how you should act, who you should become. It is not appreciated that all the really serious moral issues of our time are collective action problems, and have nothing to do with you in the sense that they have nothing to do with individuals at all. The talks that did address collective action issues were keen on making them ultimately a matter of individual responsibility or blame….

Maybe you pollute twice as much as the average person. In fact, let’s suppose you roll coal in your jacked-up truck while tossing Taco Bell wrappers out of the window and say your share of global pollution is four times the average. That is still effectively nothing—your personal causal contribution is infinitesimal to the point of meaninglessness. Here’s another way to think about it: it takes just over 2 billion pennies, lined up end-to-end, to circle the earth at the equator. If those represent pollution and you are four times as bad as the average polluter, you contributed exactly one of those pennies. Go ahead and remove your penny. Do you really think it will have a detectable effect on the Great Chain of Pennies, or that it will matter to anyone? It’s like not using social media and pretending that you are thereby contributing to solving ethical problems with Big Data, or giving to a beggar and thinking you are addressing global poverty. You are a tiny and irrelevant data point in the ocean.

UPDATE:  More on the hypocrisy charge, from philosopher Thomas Sinclair (Oxford).  One solution to the collective action problem:   "global despotism" argues philosopher Torbjörn Tännsjö (Stockholm).