Arguing to your neighbor why they should recycle their plastic water bottle can at most make an infinitesimal difference.
Creating a legal responsibility for Coca Cola to clean up the billions of plastic bottles it produces annually, on the other hand, could change the world.
It’s both. We need corporations to emit less, and they are the biggest emitters, and they do what they do for two reasons:
1. They are permitted to. Yes, government needs to intervene and prevent some of the things they do.
2. People keep giving them money, rewarding their bad behavior and providing them the means and motive to keep doing it.
We need the populace to want to make change, by voting for legislators that pass laws limiting corporations and by voting with their wallets. These usually go hand in hand.
I know there are people who vote for legislators/laws that limit consumption, who don’t make any effort to limit consumption themselves, but I don’t think there’s that many. People generally don’t want laws that change the way they are living, they want laws that make other people live the way they are living.
We don’t need to shame people for consumption, that isn’t helpful, but writing off personal responsibility is also unhelpful.
There is nothing wrong with this behavior. I will vote today for everyone to curb consumption, but I see no reason to make the sacrifice alone.
There are examples that would show me wrong, like plastic grocery bag bans. But on the other hand, there haven’t been very many such bans, and banning plastic bags is a relatively minor inconvenience, and does very little to slow climate change.
This is assuming that the dissonance is hurting more than the renunciation. People are already quite good at ignoring dissonances. And the causal effects are so removed from daily experience that often there isn’t that great of a dissonance in the first place.
It’s not about “the dissonance is painful, so they seek to correct it by not voting for reduced consumption”.
It’s “voting to reduce consumption takes effort, in knowing what to vote for and in actually casting a vote, and people are unlikely to put in that effort if they are not putting in any effort elsewhere”.
“Dissonance” was a poor choice of words for what I was trying to communicate.
With emphasis on "One".
There's 8 billion of us; our diets have varied environmental impacts; and collectively agriculture is, though not the biggest problem, a big enough problem that we can't solve climate change without also fixing it.
https://ourworldindata.org/emissions-by-sector
Also, the problem with framing it as the fault of corporations, is that the corporations do what they do in response to demand.
And the laws come with costs: this is a perennial issue during elections and "over-regulation" has been the battle cry of UK and US conservatives for as long as I've been paying attention to politics — so sure, if I was world dictator I could make it happen (and build a global power grid for green energy, we don't even need superconductors for that), but that's not the world we live in.
Making a convincing reason for consumers to demand different things, or for business to choose sustainability just because it's cheaper, or shifting the Overton Window so the relevant laws aren't just a political football, that's hard.
It would change the world in a sense of Coca Cola either going bankrupt, or shrinking to the point of irrelevance, succumbing to competitive pressure of corporations that aren't forced to do such cleanups.
Edit: Do better, HN. Explain why you disagree. This argument is a delusional meme, as if people were not the primary consumers of corporations' products. Corporations are reactionary at best and believing there's 0% responsibility on the consumer is a 5 year old child mentality.
The days of letting companies do whatever the fuck they want and doing nothing to steer their incentives in the right direction are gone. It doesn't work, end of. We need to nudge them to do the right thing, and the only thing humans care about is money.