While I do agree that it's overly simplistic to exclusively blame oil companies, and for the most part agree that we are all complicit, it isn't quite as straig

While I do agree that it's overly simplistic to exclusively blame oil companies, and for the most part agree that we are all complicit, it isn't quite as straightforward as that. Most of our jobs depend on the creation of demand for products and services that didn't exist yesterday. Capitalism isn't strictly about fulfilling our needs, but perpetually creating new needs, in order to perpetually generate more profit. Those needs become real, we're all complicit only in that all of us are incapable at this point of honestly living a fossil fuel free life. We can't radically change our society at this point, but it's naive and incorrect to assume that our unsustainable way of life was the only option. Most indigenous peoples around the globe had lived in a way that was sustainable. The Pre-columbian population of the America's is estimated to have been as high as 112 million people [0]. The societies were large and complex and yet still were able to avoid destroying their local portion of the biosphere. Even in our industrial society there have been critics of our way of life every generation and there have been people working to silence that criticism, and it's not just the average person doing this work. One the example that I find particularly surprising is that the Club of Rome's Limits to Growth, published in 1972, was a fairly major part of the American zeitgeist, so much so that Ronal Reagan specifically attacked this idea in his famous quote: > There are no great limits to growth because there are no limits of human intelligence, imagination, and wonder. Consequently an era of aggressive neoliberalism means that ideologically people are less willing to accept that infinite growth on a finite planet is a problem than they were 50 years ago. I think it's important not to fall into the easy trap of thinking that a bunch of evil oil execs are solely responsible for climate change, but at the same time it's overly simplistic, and perhaps equally dangerous, to simply say "this is what everyone wanted". A severe alcoholic might want to quit drinking, but at the same time wants to continue, if there is someone in that person's life encouraging and enabling their drinking we typically find that individual culpable in the former's struggle to recover. [0] https://uwpress.wisc.edu/books/0289.htm https://uwpress.wisc.edu/books/0289.htm