>consumers could, if they decided in mass, do literally everything the government can do this is kind of an aside, but i keep noticing this weird dissonance th

>consumers could, if they decided in mass, do literally everything the government can do this is kind of an aside, but i keep noticing this weird dissonance that keeps cropping up in conversations about regulation where people seem to assume: consumers organizing to exercise power normally allocated to a government is somehow preferable to the existing government exercising power according to civil mandate in a representative democracy, the latter is presumably the ideal. in the former situation, any context, you're talking about dual power, which is not politically stable, to put it mildly. when people say "it's not my personal responsibility" to make all the personal choices necessary to reduce carbon output, they are stating an expectation that a responsible society would systematically account for these externalities and other obligations. there is a bit of reason to this already discussed. markets by definition are not able to account for externalities, it's not possible for individuals to gather enough information to make these decisions reliably, etc. this political choice is an organized consumer choice, asking the socially approved bodies that have this information and power, to surface the results in a way that consumers can understand and react to. when this political/consumer choice is undone or blocked, or dismissed as irresponsible in preference to individual consumer behavior, it encourages individuals to organize dual power and take direct action. you can see this organizing developing through pipeline resistance and train sabotage and the like. sure, people could theoretically just buy gas from the least evil gas station or whatever, but once you've got enough people thinking about consumer choice to be effective, you've got enough people to literally just go and take apart the thing you don't like. so this dismissal of regulation is necessarily combined with repression against people advocating for organized action. i'm not sure everyone talking about this understands it or will like where it leads.