Last month I bought a Toyota Prius. Like anyone who buys one, it imbued me with a sense of smug self-righteousness. Nevermind that I paid nearly twice as much as I would have for a comparably equipped domestic car, that extra money was a license to feel superior to those unrepentant louts still paying $3.50 to drive a mere 17 miles per gallon. When I purred into my garage, coasting on battery power, that sound told me I was Doing the Right Thing; I made a personal choice to do my part to make the world a better place, and it felt good.

I didn’t think about how the Prius would be packed with more fancy gizmos than an Apple Store, and that I’d want to drive it every chance I got. Now that I have it, with its splashy GPS screen, slick Bluetooth phone interface, and no hassle iPod connector, not to mention the engine monitor that constantly reminds me exactly how much gas I’m saving, I find excuses to drive all the time. I drive three blocks to the gym because I don’t want to waste any workout time; I double-park by the ATM to deposit a check, calculating the tradeoff between that income and my lessened fuel consumption. I wade into rush hour traffic when I could have planned around it because, hey, it’s a Prius, it doesn’t count right?

This week in Slate, Christopher Hitchens wrote that Al Gore is a lock to win the Nobel Peace Prize for his work in raising the alarm about global warming. If this comes to pass, one would presume that Gore’s Inconvenient Truth represented a watershed event in which not just Americans, but citizens the world over finally changed the way we view our relationship with the planet, and in turn demand that our leaders do the same.

Vaclav Havel wrote in a New York Times op-ed this week, “We can’t endlessly fool ourselves that nothing is wrong and that we can go on cheerfully pursuing our wasteful lifestyles, ignoring the climate threats and postponing a solution.” But these calls to action have so far manifested themselves mostly in trendy displays of half-hearted solidarity that are easily discarded when its bearers are faced with real sacrifice. My Prius purchase and subsequent abuse is just one of the more expensive examples. Stop drinking bottled water (unless it’s hot outside and you’re at the 7 Eleven). Install compact fluorescent light bulbs (just not in the living room, Dear, they’re ugly). Conserve water (but don’t mind me while I leave the sprinkler on all night). Take public transportation (but meet me in the parking garage, I don’t have time to ride the smelly bus). You don’t even have to take any of those half-steps if you don’t want to; now you can pay someone else to offset your carbon footprint for you.

This is why I don’t put a lot of faith in solutions that rely on personal accountability to make much of an impact on big problems like global warming. I had all the best intentions in buying that green status symbol. My Prius gets twice the gas mileage of my old car. But I drive it twice as much. And did I mention that our other car is an SUV? Way to sacrifice. Sure, it’s natural to want to play with a shiny new toy, and in time the polish will wear off and I’ll start back to my old habits. But if I can’t make myself really change, even with the perfect tool as an incentive, why should I expect anyone else to do the same?

Our culture is built upon a spirit of individuality, but this right to be ourselves, to do whatever we want whenever we please, has mutated into a jealously guarded selfishness. We mouth promises about helping others and changing things for the better, but as soon as this requires a real sacrifice or admission of past mistakes, we find ways to pass the buck. Because we’re each the center of our own little universe, no one wants to accept any responsibility for anything that might reflect poorly on us or impede our ability to act selfishly again in the future. It’s an instinct shared by all, and reinforced by our public figures and heroes. It comes from a baseball player, who given a chance to own up to poor decisions and clear his name of a career’s worth of doubts about the provenance of his abilities, instead mumbles nonsense about “doctor and patient privileges.” It comes from the rapper I saw stand in front of his hometown Chicago crowd last week and say that Michael Vick is “misunderstood.” And it comes from our President, who despite ostentatious shows of concern, hasn’t demanded anything other than voluntary cuts in greenhouse-gas emissions.

The lion’s share of the responsibility to reverse global warming falls to our public institutions, and with the example our government has been setting, how can we expect countries like China and India, whose carbon footprint looks like Yao Ming’s compared to our Spudd Webb’s, to follow suit? It’s a sad day when Wal-Mart is leading the way in anything other than sales of Jeff Gordon t-shirts.

So maybe I’m being a little hard on myself about how much l drive my new hybrid. At the very least, my money went toward a company that seems to care.