If you don't know politics, then maybe you should learn, because the solution you are looking for is entirely political. That is to say, the solution is the creation of economic incentives that can only be structured and imposed through government power.

Yes, people need to believe that the effects of climate change will affect their lives. Laws do follow social change, in that laws that go against entrenched special interests cannot be passed unless failing to pass them becomes entirely unacceptable to a significant majority of the voting population.

But you are tilting at windmills if you think that convincing people to change their behaviors unilaterally is going to make any difference in climate change. Let's say I'm one of those people who gets on a plane every week to meet with clients. I'm not going to stop doing that because I feel an ethical obligation to prevent climate change; if I did stop, I would just be giving up that business to my competition who doesn't have any of my ethical compunctions.

You are also asking too much from ordinary people if you expect them to modify their personal consumption decisions. Maybe you can get people (in the first world) to stop eating so many hamburgers because beef production is so carbon intensive. Maybe you can get people (again, in the first world) to drive hybrid cars. But how many people are you going to convince of the overriding ethics of your position such that they will act against their own self interest (economic, cultural, social, familial)? Not enough to do what is necessary. And even those people who accept and follow these ethics are not going to have the detailed information required to make environmentally-friendly decisions throughout their lives. It's the same problem experienced with command economies: without a reliable price signal to base purchasing decisions on, counter-productive decisions (decisions that result in more carbon pollution instead of less) will be common.

The only behavioral solution to climate change is a universal carbon tax (which would of course supersede any current carbon subsidies that would need to be repealed). Only a carbon tax will allow corporations to reduce their carbon footprint without worrying about giving ground to their competition. Only a carbon tax will cause ordinary consumers to change their behavior without expecting them to completely re-vamp their ideologies and value systems. And a carbon tax can only be implemented politically.

You site smoking as an example of how focusing on changing public views can be effective. Look at the history, though. Although there had been a gradual long-term decline in adult smoking, student smoking had been climbing significantly in the US until 1998 [0], when a settlement between the tobacco companies and 46 state governments forced the tobacco companies to basically abandon the US market [1]. This demonstrates both that the demand for smoking was being propped up by corporate propaganda, and that only activism with an agenda focused on a specific litigation strategy was ever going to be effective at fighting it.

The other great example is the civil rights movement in the US. Did Martin Luther King set out to end racism in the United States? No, social change at that level would have been laughable. Civil rights leaders had very specific legislative and judicial objectives: to end state tolerance of segregation, guarantee universal suffrage, end ensure de facto equal treatment of blacks under the law. All of the activism, outreach, protest, and public-relations efforts were orchestrated and timed to maximize their effect on those specific outcomes. Broad changes in public attitudes towards race have distantly lagged the legislative and litigative successes of the civil rights movements; I believe that it was changes in the law that created the space required for attitudes to change.

Leadership is essential, but the kind of leadership we need is leadership that organizes people around narrow, actionable, and feasible legislative and judicial objectives. You are right to identify "reducing subsidies to polluting industries" as a worthwhile political objective, as well as "accounting for externalities of pollution". If you count yourself a leader fighting climate change, though, these policies cannot just be something that other people worry about. They need to be the specific and central focus of your entire effort.

[0] http://www.cdc.gov/tobacco/data_statistics/tables/trends/cig...

[1] http://publichealthlawcenter.org/topics/tobacco-control/toba...