If you take one less flight this year, you've considerably lowered your carbon footprint. Congrats. If every single person that flies reduced their carbon footprint by one flight this year like you did... it would make absolutely no meaningful difference with respect to climate change. You might as well whistle in the wind. On the other hand, if all of those people had actually taken political action, meaningful change would be practically inevitable.
The narrative that encourages recycling, buying green brands, and generally expressing how much you care about the earth by how you choose to shop (making your environmentalism part of your identity as a consumer rather than as a citizen) serves only the status quo, and dissipates energy that might otherwise be channelled into making an actual difference.
Collective actions start out as individual actions and like that they set the stage for change that is real and measurable.
By your reading Rosa Parks should have just shut up and sat in the back of the bus because 'individual virtue does absolutely, totally, precisely nothing'.
Understanding orders of magnitude is indeed not something that comes easily to humans but it must be understood to work on large problems, right alongside understanding how social change is engendered.