this post was submitted on 21 Jul 2023
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I understand what you’re saying, but the chain is long. The climate denialism runs deep. 70% of emissions since 1988 are caused by just 100 companies. And those companies aren’t just direct-to-consumer. They supply industries that supply industries. We are the last step in a very long line of handoffs between the true polluters.
Again, I understand your reasoning that if we change, they have to change to adapt, but our change is nearly insignificant when you factor in how much you’d have to change and how inaccessible that kind of change is for people. Your clothes, food, transportation, utilities, your work—literally everything we rely on to exist and survive in this capitalist world contributes to climate change. You can make all sorts of changes, provided you have the means. But not everyone does. And your going vegetarian needs about 100 other people to go vegetarian for years before you cancel our a few private jet rides.
You’re looking from the bottom up, but you can’t see past the ground floor. Not everyone has the means to change in the way you’re suggesting, and it’s just peanuts when compared with the change that would come from punishing and changing one or two companies. Thousands of people would need to go vegetarian to see the change we could achieve with much larger goals in mind. And yes, we are consumers of the companies products, but they are the ones that lobbied to make the US a car-centric country, that kept train tracks from being built—shit, that’s still happening with Elon Musk. He killed he light rail almost single-handedly because he wants people to rely on electric cars.
And that is another perfect example of this predicament. All we hear about is EV, how it’ll change the world, save the environment blah blah blah, but that’s still all marketing. to maintain the status quo while mostly greenwashing the problem of runaway capitalism. That solution serves the markets first!!
It’s smaller, personal change when we weren’t the ones that buried the environmental reports and funded climate denialism while dumping toxic sludge in rivers and escaping culpability—and this debate is still happening in places like this! Between environmentalists! Come on! How is this still happening?!
So, changing one aspect of our lives that contributes to climate change, while all of the other aspects of our consumption still do—not to mention the privilege inherent in that decision—and needing to rely on thousands of people to make that change, while we could go after the real culprits of this problem?
I’m not arguing we shouldn’t do everything we can, personally. But again, there is an inherent privilege bias in that thinking, while this type of framing lets the true motherfuckers off the hook. It keeps the heat off of them while making us argue over how best we, as individuals, can limit our minuscule contributions (relatively speaking).