I don't disagree. But I find that many people do things because it satisfy their own ego. So, they become disappointed when they find out that recycling on their own doesn't effect as a single effort, and just give up. Like, just do the right thing because it's the right thing, not because they are looking for emotional rewards. Call out those who aren't doing their part, in particular companies who are being hypocrites, instead of surrendering and doing the wrong thing adding more to the problem.

What people don't realise is that saving the earth is a collective effort. Companies do propaganda to shift the responsibilities to ordinary individuals, and ordinary individuals also shift the responsibilities to corporations. Even if we get corporations to be held more accountable, there are still far too many ordinary individuals who don't even bother. And if we count how much pollution and carbon footprint that each of offending individuals emit altogether, I'm sure it will become substantial. And it's not hard to find such individuals who don't care in our everyday lives.

I've never talked to a republican and got the idea they were educated and informed. Not American so ymmv ofc. Local rightwing voters here are just racists, so afraid that the brown man is going to steal their cookie, you know the meme. Neither educated nor informed either as far as I've talked to them.

Expecting voting to fix democratic capitalism is as ridiculous as expecting workers’ councils to fix vanguard communism.

Quite possibly, but AFAIK it's the main lever, along with voting with one's money. I'm certainly not proposing that democratic capitalism works in the long run, and yet there's no question that with a more educated base that truly wanted to maintain democracy, various nations could have done a better job staving off late-stage capitalistic collapse.

Do you think that government was the result of an educated, informed critical mass of voters taking part in regular elections?

Governments don’t care, one way or the other .

Govts consist of who the people elect, in democracies. If the people elect a bunch of grifters, for example, then you got some things you're complaining about.

The overall point is that expecting individual citizenry to solve these sustainability issues is rarely going to work, because individuals typically think of themselves first.