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Comment by RedditKon | Hacker News Reader

100 companies are responsible for 71% of global emissions. This isn't a right/left problem - both parties have let corporations get away with runaway pollution for entirely too long.

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Bullshit. 100 companies are responsible for extraction. They are selling us the carbon we are actively buying.

Thank you, I could not agree more. These companies exist because their services and products are being bought by someone else, and in the end the consumers are either actual consumers or governments (who consumers vote for). I place minimal blame on companies, because clearly consumers don't care, and instead want to buy the cheapest products possible.

That'd be great if they didn't BUY politicians to write laws that subsidize their extraction and hamper legislation to actually combat the externalities THEY produced.

Consumers do care, but their choices are between bad and awful because the economics (structured by the extraction companies) stacks the deck against solutions.

What are you talking about. The corporations, man, are not responsible for the zoning apocalypse American cities dealing with. You literally cannot live in a walkable high rise in most of Brooklyn, SF, LA, Austin, etc., not because of BIG AUTO, but because literally the neighbors there don't like tall buildings and want more free street-parking spaces for their cars.

Not to mention quite a few of those 'companies' are state-owned entities...

Would it be better to split those companies up with a series of spinoffs so it's actually 1,000 companies, or 1,000,000 smaller companies releasing 71% of global emissions? Or is the number of companies involved in fact completely arbitrary and meaningless?

This line of thinking allows consumers to pass off their responsibility for their own choices.

Who is really to blame for the emissions for my flight to Turkey to sit on a beach even though I live 4 blocks from another (worse) beach. Under your view it would be Lufthansa or whoever sold them the fuel.

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