I work in the environmental movement. I don’t care if you recycle
vox.com
vox.com
People need to take responsibility at some point. All of us enable these industries. Without consumers purchasing their product directly, or indirectly (for example, via electric cars that use electricity derived from fossil fuels), these companies would not be in business. They started their businesses because there was demand for their product; industries do not create demand. They can augment it, certainly, but some level of demand must exist.
Moreover, half of these environmental disasters are driven by directly by people wanting to purchase more stuff for less money.
Such as by enacting environmental laws.
Advocating for boycotts as the only course of action is equivalent to letting the behavior continue, because they hardly ever work. If you want results, you need collective action - i.e. laws.
The article places the blame for the current situation on the oil companies. This is ridiculous. The oil companies started to meet a demand, not because some group of people met and decided to ruin the environment and then convince people they needed oil, which is what anyone accepting the article's main point has to believe.
Same holds for electricity, people don't demand electricity from a specific source. But currently some sources meet the demands more than others. Legislation could lead to alternative sources becoming better at meeting people's demands i.e. becoming cheaper, reliable etc.
Generally, large industries have momentum which keeps them going, and therefore the way the meet demand is not necessarily the optimal way for consumers/the environment.
So the argument here is we can legislate scientific progress?
That's ridiculous
For example, in my area, our electricity is already generated cheaply by renewables, but we end up being required to pay the state mandated electricity company for 'distribution'. This unnecessary intrusion into the free market on behalf of the state is ridiculous, but again, the oil industry isn't to blame. Firstly, because the utility company is not an oil company, and secondly, because the ultimate bad guy is the state, not any private company.
Each individual acting in his or her self interest in a rational way brings irrational destruction as a collective action. That is the tragedy. The tragedy of the commons.
He closed his article with this:
“All I need you to do is want a livable future. This is your planet, and no one can advocate for it like you can. No one can protect it like you can.”
It would take a Herculean effort to make a dent in this. Every act of the industrial revolution through to today has contributed to the carbon in the air. It will literally take more than all of the energy expended over all that time and those actions to sequester the carbon released since the industrial revolution. And not even that would get us back to where the planet was before we started releasing carbon.
You realize that's ~13x than the number of people on Earth, right? If anything was rigged against everyone but the singular top person in the world, it would only be rigged against the bottom 99.999999987% (vs 99.999999999%)
Yes, each of those 100,000 is an individual, but their collective action is the opposite of inconsequential. Mankind thrived for hundreds of thousands of years without the 'intensive energy' he's been talked into shooting into his veins.
> When you consider that the same IPCC report outlined that the vast majority of global greenhouse gas emissions come from just a handful of corporations — aided and abetted by the world’s most powerful governments, including the US — it’s victim blaming, plain and simple.
To be honest, I don't really know how I personally can fight oil and gas industry. But I know how to stop driving. And flying.