Oh look, another article asking ordinary citizens to shoulder responsibility for something that is almost entirely perpetrated by corporations.
Yawn.
Yawn.
We need to stop allowing it.
I believe they are doing it to make money. Which is perfectly alright.
Isn't the government supposed to _evaluate_ and _regulate_ the market in order to account for the externalities created by X, Y, and Z corporations? If they are not doing this, what do we do? Cause we've been voting the same cronies in cycle after cycle, with the same result.
What is the definition of insanity? Our reality.
Wyoming and Vermont are the largest coal exporting states? Based on https://www.statista.com/statistics/380664/leading-us-states..., it looks like the top 5 coal exporting states are ranked 39, 24, 5, 6, and 12 in terms of population.
This has Wyoming and WV as the biggest producers. Could differ from exports, but in retrospect production is probably more important. Those states are quite small. Vermont is too. Yet they have 6 senators between them.
Stroads, for instance, only came about after a ton of corporate spending on propaganda and lobbying to increase demand for automobiles.
If you contaminate the water supply of a city in order to create demand for your water purification product, then is the resulting consumer demand your fault or theirs?
no need for evil corps for this lifestyle to be appealing to lots of people
Corporations don't just emit greenhouse gases for the fun of it, like some sort of villain, they do it because they produce the stuff that we, the "ordinary citizens" buy like mad every Christmas or whenever we have $200 extra in our bank accounts.
Corporations will do anything permitted by the law and that's no secret. That includes evading taxes, sub-living wages or pollution. Ordinary citizens allow this by buying the products of those corporations and by not voting for more green policies.
To assign the blame solely on corporations and remove "ordinary citizens" from the equation is short-sighted at best.
"will do anything permitted by the law"
Exactly. So start changing the law. Blaming consumers will get us nowhere. Change the law. Enforce the law. Force corporations to act.
But it will be heavily unpopular as it will reduce people’s quality of life in the short term, even for the rest of their life, plus globally, other populations would be happy to pick up the demand.
For you, the buck stops at whatever citizens currently exist on the planet/continent/country/state/city/town.
For me, the buck stops at the corporations and governments who are more than responsible for the current mess we are in. You do realize these chucklef*cks are still flying around on private jets, right?
I don't like citizen going crazy on corporations (which I despise often). Because most of the product they buy are conscious and free decision. Blame corps for tapping into human reflexes (rule 1 of any commercial anything).
A bit off-topic, but corporations will also do things not permitted by the law if the potential penalties are likely to be significantly lower than the potential profits.
And, of course, they also expend significant resources to shape the law to serve their interests, and appear to be significantly more effective at this than "ordinary citizens".
The reason people blame corporations is because it's very difficult to find the people who own them, and because they have a realistic view of power.
It's interesting to look at the long term trends, especially when looking at some of the largest economies on the planet.
Comparing the US[0] and China[1], the US has:
- Decreasing per capita emissions in the US starting in 1973 (-27%)
- A decrease in the countries emission starting in 2007 (-13%)
Meanwhile for the same period China has had
- a 7x increase per capita since 1973 (+532%)
- 48% increase for its global emissions since 2007
If a country decides to impose a burden on itself by doing the right thing and going green (like the EU and US are doing) then China can just bring on more coal plants online to bring the price of their goods down and crush the competition. Nobody in the western world can compete with that.
It's time we start holding governments accountable and impose tariffs and immigration quotas on misbehaving countries.
And it needs to happen soon too, because we've already squandered 30 year of doing nothing.