Most of the direct human exposure seems to come from polyester, which we have raced to make the dominant clothing and bedding fabric.
Maybe we should convince government to do less of those things somehow?
But also:
Polyester is just so cheap that any feasible oil tax wouldn't amount.
For the past several years a large fraction of people have literally been inhaling every lungful of air through a frangible polyester microfiber that they wear around their mouth & nose. We tear these fabrics to shreds and then manually extract the lint from the dryer with our bare hands so it won't start a fire. Putting the finest dispersal mechanism we have, micro-spun fibers, directly into our lungs, and not even thinking about the consequences, seems like maybe it's an orthogonal bad choice we are making which could have orthogonal solutions.
However, I am also wary of the push to view mitigations or "consumer behavior" generally as a means to actually deal with this kind of problem at scale. Like the whole carbon footprint thing BP was pushing for a while. Still in the public lexicon, doesn't do jack shit about real emissions at scale, but great for gotchas on activists. We have significant poison control and food quality control regulations because people can't really develop all the expertise necessary to vet all their own stuff, and it's a huge drain on society to make them do so rather than just solve that coordination problem centrally. Also, monopolistic consolidation has made even very organized boycotts dubiously feasible in forcing change in companies who respond more to their investors than their customers.
To me, governments exist to solve exactly this kind of problem, even though there are many other areas in which I would like them to mind their own business. In this case a lot of why petrochemicals are so cheap is because the cost of doing business for oil companies is heavily subsidized, so removing those subsidies wouldn't even require a new tax, and that money could be productively spent on lots of stuff, like maybe medical research even
Boycotts are a luxury that only the middle class can afford to participate in, and they don't really have the potential to participate in more than one or two at a time.
That is not a restriction that an effective boycott of an entire industrial method can labor under. The "personal responsibility" crowd have it dead wrong - we are trapped in this system and have very limited choices about what we consume, far too limited to allow us to collectively throw out an industrial technique that is anything less than lethal to us.
Ultimately, the only thing powerful enough to take on a cartel is a government. A lot of people have negative feelings about the abstract concept of government, and certainly the government sucks sometimes. Nearly any way that an individual can come up against power has the potential to suck a lot
However, democratic governments for all their failings are far more responsive than consolidated industries to pressure from people who want change. Our "brand of capitalism" - by which I mean the particular economic and regulatory policies of the US government at this moment in time - is doing significant harm to the majority of people, in a way that it just wasn't in my parents' generation, and it doesn't have to stay this way. The options are not accept how things are or tilt at windmills by doing a master's thesis worth of research for every item we buy at the grocery store. The political will for better safety nets, better research and regulation, economic policy that helps the majority of people instead of a tiny sliver of the most deep-pocketed, and siccing the government on the cartels that increasingly dominate every industry is pervasive. The bet cartels are making is that they can create apathy and confusion to forestall this until they can burn down the institution of democracy itself