If I eat a bag of chips and throw it to the ground, "restoring the environment" does not mean going back to the stone age, it means picking it up and putting in on a trash can (plus whatever downstream actions that are involved). Anyone connected with objective reality understands that.
If oil companies (and any other company), by carrying out their operations, incur on some environmental damage, they have to be held liable for it.
One could argue "well, vote with your wallet then", but there's overwhelming evidence showing that people choose cheap over any other quality of a product, also, sometimes there's not even the possibility of a choice to be made.
What solution would you propose, then, around this?
It's a comfort item, like your house. For it to exist there needs to be grocery stores. For that, there needs to be air conditioning. Otherwise the chips would be rancid from 100 degree heat, let alone the fact it would have been shipped to the "grocery store" on horseback, again making the cost very extreme.
Every damn thing you have for comfort not only depended on cheap oil, it would be impossible for our civilization to even have the internet without it. You can't expect TCP engineers to work in tents right? We wouldn't even have the ability to order up a 9 yard concrete truck in 30 minutes.
So yes, for that bag of chips to exist, literally cost trillions of dollars.
"(plus whatever downstream actions that are involved)"
>So yes, for that bag of chips to exist, literally cost trillions of dollars.
You're off by trillions of dollars. It's amortized cost is somewhere between zero and the dollar you paid for it.