I strongly disagree here. How are individuals not to blame if they refuse to bear the costs for all the negative externalities they cause?
We still live in a democracy, and have known about climate change for over 40 years- the central problem is just that people are (still) NOT willing to pay the price to avoid/mitigate emissions.
Because the options are plentiful, like just taxing CO2 emissions and imports, throwing massive funds at low-CO2 energy sources + storage, but taxpayers are simply unwilling- blaming corporations and politicians NOW is the absolute height of hypocrisy.
I wasn't suggesting we solve this problem through individual action. I'm not sure how you got that impression from my post. For what it's worth I agree with you: the focus on individual responsibility and personal guilt over climate change is the great distraction that has allowed corporations to continue polluting unabated.
The problem, and the point of my post, was that collective action can only be done by legislation, and in a democracy politicians are beholden to the electorate. Most people don't want to suffer higher prices for goods and services, so most people won't vote for any politicians that support policies that will have real impact on climate change.
We are not innocents, but we are not the perpetuators either. We should bare the responsibility by paying a premium for any surplus CO2 emitted during the production and transfer of any product we buy. But it will only happen with sane, international laws that take into account the environmental impact of all products.
Also, a large populace is easily manipulated and democracy is not that direct for the average person to have a proper say. And “the market will solve it” mentality never ever worked, not even thought to work by Adam Smith generally — only in very regulated markets.
E.g. people wouldn't get a choice to buy from non carbon neutral businesses if legislation was put in place to ramp up a carbon fee. And they would all benefit from this.
Governments are the parties who generally are responsible for fixing structural problems.
The market is composed of companies that operate within boundaries set by the government.
Individuals are more or less forced to live their lives by the market environment where they live.
The solution is in governments and corporations.
The only reason why one would want to fix the problem via individual consumers is in fact if one:
a) does not want to fix the problem
b) wants to direct blame from the more guilty party (energy companies) to the consumer
OFC this is not that black or white. Currently there are NO OPTIONS to fossil fuels to keep planetary civilization running.
its NOT individual person's fault. Its large dirty businesses that create majority of the pollution. Only way to fight global warming is to target them to pay for their externalities.
You can help, you can recycle. But all of the businesses could be forced to use environmental responsible packaging.
Thats the kind of externalities I am talking about.
How come when a tanker spills oil in gulf we as tax payers pay for the clean-up, how come when a power lines start forest fires we have to pick up the bill?? And so on...
Blaming the “companies” and “lobbyists” is such a cop-out. The companies are just giving people what they want. If people demanded a shift to a climate friendly lifestyle tomorrow, Exxon would have no choice but to follow suit.
Looking at the major trends of the last several decades. People moving to brand new sunbelt suburbs where they drive everywhere in SUVs. Buying disposable clothes, electronics, etc., made in China and shipped over the ocean. Even the token attempts at being environmentally conscious are ridiculous. I go to Whole Foods here in Maryland and everything is grown in f—king California. It’s a joke.
Nobody is willing to make the lifestyle changes it would take to have a real impact on climate change. And it’s not unique to the US. Canada and Australia have similar carbon footprints per capita, suggesting it’s more a combination of material wealth and low density. Blaming corporations instead of the people for all that is asinine.
And what are our best and brightest from Stanford, etc., doing? Figuring out carbon recapture? No, working at Google figuring out how to more effectively advertise disposable consumer goods that are shipped over from China, used a few times, and shipped back to China for disposal.
Yeah. Because it's hard to deal with that at an individual level. Most people don't want to be the ones giving things up while other people ignore it. They may want to choose public transport instead of a car, but that's hard without a massive investment, which doesn't happen when a lot of people portray that as unnecessary.
One straightforward route to fixing all of that consumerism is a carbon tax. People will consume less when it costs more. But no carbon tax will be passed, because of denialists.
You can reduce your own consumption, and a lot of people do. But that's not sufficient, and it gets less sufficient every day. The longer we took to act, the bigger changes were required to deal with it. And it was the denialists that prevented action.
Industry played a big part in convincing them, but they made the individual choices to believe corporate shills over scientists. So yes, I blame them.
I'm not saying you can't blame individuals. I'm just saying you're not going to actually solve the problem by blaming individuals.
If your local utility burns coal or natural gas, there's not really any amount of shaming of the consumers that will change the carbon output of those utilities. If concrete and steel manufacturers are emitting carbon at hugely high rates, there's no amount of individual shaming of occupants of buildings made with that concrete and steel that will change that.
But regulations at the governmental level to direct those industries into emitting less carbon, that has a realistic path to actually making a different.
While I agree that we blaming individuals is ridiculous, actually addressing this issue and getting towards zero emissions anywhere near enough time will make:
> significant personal expense
Look like luxury living.
Our economy is energy, and currently the vast majority of the energy comes from hydrocarbons. We simply cannot scale renewables up high enough, fast enough, to avoid catastrophe without a change in live style so severe that most people would over throw governments in protest.
People on this site think wearing a face mask during a pandemic is a material injustice.
It doesn't assume away the problem. It is the problem. The issue isn't the lifestyle. The issue is how the resources are gathered and how the power is produced. Those are the issues - the lifestyle isn't the issue.
You have been sucked into believing by corporations that you are the issue but it's the corporations who are the issue. They want you to take personal responsibility for their issues. Everything is pushed onto the end user and the individual as responsibility rather than a corporation to do things in a manner that is best for us all. You know why? Cause that's good for the corporations! They can do horrible things and not have to deal with any of the externalities that they're creating and rake in the profit! These strategies have been mainstream for well over 50 years now.
Keep believing that personal responsibility is really the key to solving climate change but it will continue to do nothing and mean nothing. The responsibility is within your governmental body to take over how corporations are producing their products, harvesting resources, generating power, and the externalities that their products create.
The truth is also that this is not a problem you or I created. We leave our lives fairly simply I'm sure, choosing not to harm others. When we make choices, these choices are provisioned for us by the governance structure and the corporations. The same entities that cause environmental damage (eg wrt fires - cutting down pristine forests rather than farming them, poor forest management in not undertaking controlled burns, etc). This is not our fault. To me, this is directly equivalent to the Christian idea that we are born in sin. We are not.
However, it is expedient that this is the message that we receive and so we are being blamed for 'climate change'. Those doing the blaming are those that caused the problem - corporations and governments.
Rather than take a positive action to address the problem, even if there is a hit to the bottom line (money), it is far easier and cheaper to 'socialise' the risk. So corporation use lobbyists etc to make government put the costs on the general population (carbon taxes, 'smart' cities, etc). And, as it happens, this provides the same corporations with the opportunity to make even more money, providing us with the governmental solutions that they lobbied to achieve!
Its a win/win for the corporations. Its lose/lose for the general public.
Great, now you have two parties who both don't think they are responsible for the problem. Customers blame companies. Companies blame customers. Nobody thinks about the real problem which is the fact that governments are allowing the continued subsidy of CO2 emissions. You can't expect a system that is built around incentivizing CO2 emissions to reduce CO2 emissions for the sake of charity.
How about not letting high income people use the baseline needs of low income people to deflect responsibility for their freely made choices? Especially when they're responsible for a much larger fraction of the carbon footprint. It's not only on corporations.
The best individual action you can do is agitate for political and corporate change. Almost all the blame is on corporations and government bodies. The emissions of individuals pales in comparison.
I'm actually tired of the "blame the general public" argument. Blame the agricultural industry for this. I'm not going to take the blame for deforestation or lack of fresh water every time I eat a cheesburger, nor am I going to assume blame for pollution when I drive my car. Unless billions of people change within the next few years (which is so unrealistic that I feel comfortable saying it won't happen) then my individual do-gooder actions will only bring self-satisfaction, not real change.
Blaming the every-man for this stuff is a cop out. Corporations are to blame. Real change will only come about through government (semi-likely) or self-regulation within industries (very unlikely).
The obvious contrapositive to this is what happened during the pandemic: everyone stopped driving for a couple months and it had... Almost no impact. The curtain is pulled back now: the call for "individual responsibility" is exposed as cynical the PR tactic it is... Much like "plastic recycling". The fact is 1) Big corporations 2) Big corporations and 3) Big corporations in concert with the legislators they've captured are responsible for climate change. As an individual the most effective behavior you can exhibit to limit climate change is to vote with 1) Your Democracy while you still have it and more importantly 2) Your wallet.
You’re downvoted, but you’re right; “personal carbon footprint”, plastic straws, and boycotts of companies behaving egregiously etc. are all traps to blame individuals for problems caused by other actors. Empowering individuals to solve societal problems rarely work.¹
I think it's problematic to focus exclusively on individual responsibility for averting climate change. Climate change is a massive global problem, intimately related to the structure of the global economy. The scale of the problem and the changes needed to mitigate it are thus far beyond the reach of any individual consumer. Problems at this scale can only be addressed by nation states and transnational actors, as was done for CFCs for example. Unfortunately these actors have been dragging their feet for decades. I am skeptical that they will be able to get their acts together in time to avert catastrophe.
The other piece is that individual action is good, but laughably ineffective in broad strokes. When we talk about polluters and wasters of renewable and non-renewable resources, corporations are the biggest culprits.
If we really want to conquer climate change, it starts by forcing the market to internalize the economic costs rather than passing them onto the taxpayer (and individual). Policies like cap and trade, polluter pays, and so on, are what's most effective at curbing climate change. Incentivizing proactive shifts (and penalizing laggards) towards renewable resources in manufacturing are what's required.
We still live in a democracy, and have known about climate change for over 40 years- the central problem is just that people are (still) NOT willing to pay the price to avoid/mitigate emissions.
Because the options are plentiful, like just taxing CO2 emissions and imports, throwing massive funds at low-CO2 energy sources + storage, but taxpayers are simply unwilling- blaming corporations and politicians NOW is the absolute height of hypocrisy.
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