> What can be more powerful than the collective power of masses?
An entity that isn't tempted to defect from a boycott:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Paul_Milgrom
> Milgrom, together with Barry Weingast and Avner Greif, applied a repeated game model to explain the role of merchant guilds in the medieval period (Greif, Milgrom and Weingast, 1994). The paper beings with the observation that long-distance trade in the somewhat chaotic environment of the Middle Ages exposed traveling merchants to the risk of attack, confiscation of goods and unenforced agreements. Merchants thus required the assistance of local rulers for protection of person, property and contract. But what reason did rulers have to provide this assistance? A key insight from the paper is that neither bilateral nor multilateral reputation mechanisms can support the incentives of a ruler to protect foreign merchants as trade reaches an efficient level. The reason is that at the efficient level the marginal value of losing the trade of a single or even a subset of merchants—in their attempt to punish a defaulting ruler—approaches zero. The threat is, thus, insufficient to deter a ruler from confiscating goods or to encourage their expenditure of resources or political capital to defend foreign merchants against local citizens. Effective punishment that will deter rulers' bad behavior requires more extensive coordination of effectively all the merchants who provide value for the ruler. The question then becomes, what incentives do the merchants have to participate in the collective boycott? Here is the role for the Merchant Guild, an organization that has the power to punish its own members for failure to abide by a boycott announced by the guild.
The parallels between this scenario and the one we're talking about are obvious: Any company big enough to cause serious damage by its pollution is not going to be harmed by a boycott unless nearly everyone in India participates, but the value gained from defecting (in game-theoretic terms) from the boycott is too large for that to happen. So, instead of forming a guild to punish defection, which just increases the misery in the world, we institute government agencies to punish polluters directly instead of trying to use boycotts to punish them. Say what you will about the morality of such a system, I can go outside today and see green grass, clear skies, and breathe the air without damaging my lungs.
> It is better to take some steps and do something about problems than to wait for government or any other "powerful" body to come help you out.
Except in this case, this do-it-yourself strategy has been demonstrated to not work.