I had an initial negative reaction to this comment and tried to figure out why - I think the main reason is that you're putting the blame on individuals for sys

I had an initial negative reaction to this comment and tried to figure out why - I think the main reason is that you're putting the blame on individuals for systemic problems. I don't think any amount of individual people trying to be better is going to counteract the damage being done at scale by our large companies. There's definitely a bunch of issues where collective action can work great, but everyone at BP recycling isn't going to fix the next time they set the ocean on fire or get them to stop drilling for oil. This feels kinda like other arguments I see for systemic problems where we blame individuals in the US - we have the most people in jail because they make bad decisions, we have the most shootings because those people are bad, we have so much obesity because people don't have self control, etc - but all these are happening across the population and not in other countries so the cause can't be the individual people, it has to be caused by the environment we're in. As another argument that ignores the blame question altogether - it's just about how we can make the biggest impact the fastest. It's much easier to pass a law saying that makes it prohibitively expensive to be an oil company than it is to say people need to limit their driving more, and the downstream effect will be the same with less people using oil