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> Green policies had seldom required private citizens to roll up their sleeves and make big, disruptive changes to their lives. Now they are starting to, and ma

> Green policies had seldom required private citizens to roll up their sleeves and make big, disruptive changes to their lives. Now they are starting to, and many people do not like it. This is the problem. Putting so much of the burden on the consumer and hardly any on the manufacturers, companies and so on. Consumers contribute just a small percentage of the problem but are being asked to account for much more.

cvccvroomvroom 3y ago
Solving huge geoengineering problems require full lifecycle participation, not a fight or passing the buck. We can't individually recycle or plant trees our way out of this with significant CC&S that must be done with economies of scale.
rayiner 3y ago
Consumers are ultimately the ones that account for all of the problem. Not a drop of oil gets pumped from the ground without the consumer demand. And the thing about climate change is that consumption is much more equal than financial wealth. A Wall Street banker doesn’t have a carbon footprint that much higher than a regular person. Maybe even less.
- pharmakom 3y ago
  Carbon consumption is still highly skewed.
- toomuchtodo 3y ago
  The average net worth of someone who flies private is $190M, and flying private has an outsized carbon footprint. Okay if we tax those miles and pay Climeworks (direct air carbon capture is currently the only legitimate carbon offset mechanism) to suck the CO2 back out of the air? This is not even hard, we can bill based on their ADS-B broadcast flight track. Agree that the problem with the investments of the wealthy driving climate change is consumer demand that needs to be destroyed (EVs, heat pumps, solar, factory farming protein, etc). https://www.theguardian.com/environment/2022/feb/04/carbon-footprint-gap-between-rich-poor-expanding-study https://www.theguardian.com/environment/2022/feb/04/carbon-f... https://www.oxfam.org/en/press-releases/billionaire-emits-million-times-more-greenhouse-gases-average-person https://www.oxfam.org/en/press-releases/billionaire-emits-mi...
  - deleted 3y ago
    [deleted]
  - DennisP 3y ago
    I think that's a great idea. But taxing private flights won't do that much on its own. From googling the other day, flying is 2% of total carbon emissions and private jets are about 1% of that, for 0.02% total.
    - toomuchtodo 3y ago
      The problem is there is no one single solution, but a bunch of them executed in parallel. Which makes sense when everyone globally is treating the atmosphere like an open air burn pit for combustion.
    - alanfranz 3y ago
      There’s no single activity that accounts for 50% of carbon emissions. And if there was, we probably all contributed to it. We need to shave co2 off everything, as if we were doing weight reduction to a bicycle.
  - lukas099 3y ago
    > direct air carbon capture is currently the only legitimate carbon offset mechanism Source and/or explanation?
    - callalex 3y ago
      “Carbon offsets aren’t doing their job/overstate impact” https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=37284764 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=37284764
    - godelski 3y ago
      It definitely isn't the only offset mechanism. But it is the only reduction method, by definition. Reduction not in production rate obviously, but total levels. We definitely should be funding research (because systems aren't good enough yet) into these systems because we're not acting fast enough and CCS has the advantage of acting on the lag effect. But this is no excuse to not also reduce emissions. They're coupled: we need less CCS the less we produce which is nice especially considering nuclear is a cheaper option than CCS at this point.
- Spivak 3y ago
  Yes and if you change what's on offer you'll see the demand change. Consumers are good and service takers, the only person that can stop releasing carbon is the person actually releasing the carbon. You will never move a river by asking each drop, you build a dam.
- laserdancepony 3y ago
  > A Wall Street banker doesn’t have a carbon footprint that much higher than a regular person. Found the millionaire coping with his excessive consumption. No really, I don't own a car, don't fly, don't go on cruises, don't go on vacation three times a year any other way, live in a 50 sq m flat without anything but the most basic amenities. And you know why? Because I'm poor, that's why. Like most of Earths population. So don't try to tell me my carbon footprint is the same as Gordon Geckos, it simply can not be true.
- ericjmorey 3y ago
  The US military is by far the largest consumer of oil.
- throwaway894345 3y ago
  Consumers don’t demand “products manufactured from fossil fuels”, they demand products (full stop). Indeed, I suspect most consumers have an environmental bias which isn’t reflected in the market for lack of transparency (how do you tell if a product is green or merely green washed?) and also because fossil fuels are and have long been heavily subsidized.
- morsch 3y ago
  > A Wall Street banker doesn’t have a carbon footprint that much higher than a regular person. Maybe even less. That is just not true. https://www.theguardian.com/environment/2022/feb/04/carbon-footprint-gap-between-rich-poor-expanding-study https://www.theguardian.com/environment/2022/feb/04/carbon-f... There are many other sources.
  - rayiner 3y ago
    That’s comparing people between rich countries and poor countries.
    - DennisP 3y ago
      Not entirely: > in the UK, the least wealthy half of the population accounts for less than 20% of final demand, less than the top 5% consumes.
- godelski 3y ago
  > Consumers are ultimately the ones that account for all of the problem. You got this backwards. It's like trying to clean up a river by only picking up trash at its mouth. You're not going to do a great job. Consumers can only buy what's available. Most people are too poor to make choices other than that on price. Capitalism can work great for price reduction but one way to do price reduction is quality reduction. If the whole non-luxury market is focusing on price reduction and the easiest way is to achieve that is quality reduction then guess what happens. On the other hand, if quality has to hold constant -- which happens when consumers are less price sensitive and won't go for a slightly cheaper option when competitor tries quality drop -- you have to research and build better and/or cheaper. BUT if most major players try the same strategy of quality reduction at the same time then consumers never get the chance to indicate to the market that they value quality. > A Wall Street banker doesn’t have a carbon footprint that much higher than a regular person. Maybe even less. Maybe don't guess and check first. We're on the internet, you don't have to respond immediately and state something that is verifiably false. While we don't have good refined data on specific jobs, there is strong correlation with wealth levels and specifically consumption rates. But if you're modeling a Wall Street banker as someone who works all day, takes the subway, sleeps, and never takes vacation then sure, that's lower. But don't confuse the mean and the median. Edit: Taking our analogy from above: if all producers simultaneously have to do "x" then all consumers automatically also choose "x". This is where regulation can play a role since you can do things like "all cars must get at least 50mpg" or have a more market driven approach like "$100 fee per ton CO2eq" and use that fee to perform such actions like sequestration and/or research to make sequestration effective and cheap.
  - tonyedgecombe 3y ago
    >Consumers can only buy what's available. We live in an era of unprecedented consumer choice. Especially for the rich who you rightly pointed out are the source of the problems we are trying to ameliorate.
    - godelski 3y ago
      > We live in an era of unprecedented consumer choice. In some ways yes, in some ways no. Markets aren't exclusively driven by consumers and such framing is incredibly naive. You can't buy the fruit that doesn't exist.
- jabradoodle 3y ago
  Sorry but this is insane. I want electricity, or more accurately I want to heat my home, wash my clothes, etc. It is not my consumption that has caused us to continue subsiding oil and not investing properly in renewables for over half a century.
solardev 3y ago
What do you mean? Aren't consumers usually on the trailing end of these sorts of things? In the US at least, and especially the West Coast, things like SEER (HVAC efficiency) and CAFE standards (car fuel economy) have been steadily rising, at least until Republican officials push back. Building codes include better and better rules for renewable energy production, insulation, etc. In the private sector things like LEED encourage buildings to utilize better materials, passive heating and cooling, water management, etc. Those are all constraints on the manufacturers and companies. Where consumers are encouraged to change to newer appliances, grants usually help cover the costs of new fridges, LED lights, HVAC equipment, sprinklers, etc. Heat pumps as a consumer phenomenon didn't even catch on until very recently, decades after regulations spurred market innovation. Maybe it works differently in Germany, but here at least it seems like we go way out of our way to incentivize consumer behavior over decades instead of forcing through overnight changes. Could it be a marketing issue, where governments and manufacturers making these iterative changes don't really broadcast them to the public at large, such that when the changes finally hit the average homeowner, they are still caught by surprise? To them it might seem like a sudden change even though it's been happening behind the scenes for years?
- michaelt 3y ago
  It depends on how you want to attribute carbon emissions. If Brits want to hear a Taylor Swift concert, and Swift's private jet crosses the Atlantic twice emitting 700 tonnes of CO2 emissions in the process - are those Swift's emissions? Or have 900,000 concertgoers each emitted 7kg of CO2, equivalent to driving 2 miles? What about if, instead of Taylor Swift tickets, we consider electricity? More consumption directly increases the power plant's emissions - but consumers can't control whether coal, gas, nuclear or solar supplies their power. If you take the view that corporations' emissions are attributable to the corporation, not their customers - then corporations are much, much less green than consumers. And we'd need to focus more on emissions by giant corporations, and less on plastic straw bans.
  - solardev 3y ago
    I get what you're saying, but I think it's less about assigning blame in a "us vs them" situation and more of a "how can we clean up the whole system lifecycle" question. The CAFE model seems to work for that. It doesn't really matter whether it's the driver or the car manufacturer, taxpayers front the regulatory research and costs, manufacturers moan and whine then eventually comply to some degree, consumers buy cars with slightly better mileage each year, over time things get better. Then Tesla comes around and makes electrification a reality, etc. Similarly with the solar market, subsidies spurred investment and research and deployment and helped foster growth, until there is so much of it that (say) California's grid can hardly keep up, China saw the market and took it over, etc. These days it's a commodity. Government carrots do work, is all I'm saying. You can create demands and markets through planned public investments. Sometimes, though, we do blame fossil fuels companies, whether they're using tankers or oil rigs or pipelines. Sometimes those controversies can help spur better protections and safety regulations and whatnot, but at the end of the day your point stands: from a climatic standpoint the emissions are there whether we attribute it to a single company or a million individuals. Maybe the accounting is different and helps different political players, but the atmosphere doesn't care how we divvy it up. IMO Taylor Swift flying in a private jet isn't that different than, say, OpenAI making a bunch of CO2 for a product that millions of people end up using, or Larian spending a bazillion CPU and GPU hours to make Baldur's Gate, or some politico flying back and forth to attend climate meetings. At the other extreme, Greta sails low impact and has great marketing, but that only goes so far. We still need everyday solutions that mid size companies and governments can implement on actionable timescales. That typically means low hanging fruits like more solar, more batteries, occasionally nuclear, incremental standards, etc. Is it enough? No, not nearly. But I think it's more than we've gotten from, say, Greenpeace or PETA. People generally respond better and faster to carrots than disciplinary punishments...
paulcole 3y ago
“Consumers contribute just a small percentage of the problem” is only true if you believe 100% is a small percentage. This is the attitude that shows that “fixing” climate change is doomed. Everybody can find somebody else who’s “worse” to blame the problem on and so they justify doing nothing themselves.
callalex 3y ago
The whole “corporations are the real polluters” is absolute political nonsense that people lie to themselves about to justify their own lazy resistance to change. It’s not like Shell pumps oil out of the ground because they think it’s fun, they do it because people buy the oil to transport themselves and heat their home. It’s not like coca-cola wakes up every morning and thinks “wow I wish there was more plastic litter” they make beverages that people purchase and drink. It’s not like steel companies just really get their giggles from turning rocks into liquid by using a ton of energy, they are making washing machines and stoves and trains that people use to live their life.
- paulcole 3y ago
  100% correct take and it’s no surprise you’re downvoted with no replies. I understand why people cry that “corporations are the problem” but I can’t believe that deep down they believe it.
  - tonyedgecombe 3y ago
    It's not that surprising. Not only do they absolve themselves of any blame but they also get to point the finger at somebody else.
- akamaka 3y ago
  That’s not taking into account that there is a vast difference in how much pollution is emitted by different oil producers during extraction and refining. Some companies have invested into cleaning up their operations, while dirtier oil sources emit a full 1/3rd of their total pollution before the fuel even arrives at the gas pump.
- jabradoodle 3y ago
  https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/ExxonMobil_climate_change_denial https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/ExxonMobil_climate_change_de...
- whelp_24 3y ago
  The personal responsibility theory of pollution was made up by these corporations you are defending. The reason that companies make products is to sell them yes. But the reason the products are made in polluting ways and with essentially unrecylable materials is cost cutting. Regulate industries to use the more expensive but less impactful production methods, and you find that pollution will actually go down in a way that matters. Tell individuals to stop buying plastic bottles and you'll get a subset of the middle to upper class to somewhat comply. Make plastic bottles illegal (or at least mandate that the company buy them back to really recycle) and the problem becomes moot, it's not like individuals can make plastic. Same for fuel, waste disposal, etc, etc. The only thing consumers could do is buy less, but life makes that rather hard. The companies that you are trying to absolve lobby to make that harder.
Glench 3y ago
> This is the problem. Putting so much of the burden on the consumer and hardly any on the manufacturers, companies and so on. Between space heating, transportation, water heating, and cooking, about 42% of energy-related emissions are things that consumers have some control over in their homes. We have to decarbonize both the supply side (which is happening super rapidly with wind/solar) as well as the demand side (which is much harder because it requires coordinated action across millions of people). And we have to do this incredibly swiftly to keep a livable climate. Source: https://www.rewiringamerica.org/pace https://www.rewiringamerica.org/pace

cvccvroomvroom 3y ago

Solving huge geoengineering problems require full lifecycle participation, not a fight or passing the buck. We can't individually recycle or plant trees our way out of this with significant CC&S that must be done with economies of scale.

rayiner 3y ago

Consumers are ultimately the ones that account for all of the problem. Not a drop of oil gets pumped from the ground without the consumer demand. And the thing about climate change is that consumption is much more equal than financial wealth. A Wall Street banker doesn’t have a carbon footprint that much higher than a regular person. Maybe even less.

pharmakom 3y ago
Carbon consumption is still highly skewed.
toomuchtodo 3y ago
The average net worth of someone who flies private is $190M, and flying private has an outsized carbon footprint. Okay if we tax those miles and pay Climeworks (direct air carbon capture is currently the only legitimate carbon offset mechanism) to suck the CO2 back out of the air? This is not even hard, we can bill based on their ADS-B broadcast flight track. Agree that the problem with the investments of the wealthy driving climate change is consumer demand that needs to be destroyed (EVs, heat pumps, solar, factory farming protein, etc). https://www.theguardian.com/environment/2022/feb/04/carbon-footprint-gap-between-rich-poor-expanding-study https://www.theguardian.com/environment/2022/feb/04/carbon-f... https://www.oxfam.org/en/press-releases/billionaire-emits-million-times-more-greenhouse-gases-average-person https://www.oxfam.org/en/press-releases/billionaire-emits-mi...
- deleted 3y ago
  [deleted]
- DennisP 3y ago
  I think that's a great idea. But taxing private flights won't do that much on its own. From googling the other day, flying is 2% of total carbon emissions and private jets are about 1% of that, for 0.02% total.
  - toomuchtodo 3y ago
    The problem is there is no one single solution, but a bunch of them executed in parallel. Which makes sense when everyone globally is treating the atmosphere like an open air burn pit for combustion.
  - alanfranz 3y ago
    There’s no single activity that accounts for 50% of carbon emissions. And if there was, we probably all contributed to it. We need to shave co2 off everything, as if we were doing weight reduction to a bicycle.
- lukas099 3y ago
  > direct air carbon capture is currently the only legitimate carbon offset mechanism Source and/or explanation?
  - callalex 3y ago
    “Carbon offsets aren’t doing their job/overstate impact” https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=37284764 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=37284764
  - godelski 3y ago
    It definitely isn't the only offset mechanism. But it is the only reduction method, by definition. Reduction not in production rate obviously, but total levels. We definitely should be funding research (because systems aren't good enough yet) into these systems because we're not acting fast enough and CCS has the advantage of acting on the lag effect. But this is no excuse to not also reduce emissions. They're coupled: we need less CCS the less we produce which is nice especially considering nuclear is a cheaper option than CCS at this point.
Spivak 3y ago
Yes and if you change what's on offer you'll see the demand change. Consumers are good and service takers, the only person that can stop releasing carbon is the person actually releasing the carbon. You will never move a river by asking each drop, you build a dam.
laserdancepony 3y ago
> A Wall Street banker doesn’t have a carbon footprint that much higher than a regular person. Found the millionaire coping with his excessive consumption. No really, I don't own a car, don't fly, don't go on cruises, don't go on vacation three times a year any other way, live in a 50 sq m flat without anything but the most basic amenities. And you know why? Because I'm poor, that's why. Like most of Earths population. So don't try to tell me my carbon footprint is the same as Gordon Geckos, it simply can not be true.
ericjmorey 3y ago
The US military is by far the largest consumer of oil.
throwaway894345 3y ago
Consumers don’t demand “products manufactured from fossil fuels”, they demand products (full stop). Indeed, I suspect most consumers have an environmental bias which isn’t reflected in the market for lack of transparency (how do you tell if a product is green or merely green washed?) and also because fossil fuels are and have long been heavily subsidized.
morsch 3y ago
> A Wall Street banker doesn’t have a carbon footprint that much higher than a regular person. Maybe even less. That is just not true. https://www.theguardian.com/environment/2022/feb/04/carbon-footprint-gap-between-rich-poor-expanding-study https://www.theguardian.com/environment/2022/feb/04/carbon-f... There are many other sources.
- rayiner 3y ago
  That’s comparing people between rich countries and poor countries.
  - DennisP 3y ago
    Not entirely: > in the UK, the least wealthy half of the population accounts for less than 20% of final demand, less than the top 5% consumes.
godelski 3y ago
> Consumers are ultimately the ones that account for all of the problem. You got this backwards. It's like trying to clean up a river by only picking up trash at its mouth. You're not going to do a great job. Consumers can only buy what's available. Most people are too poor to make choices other than that on price. Capitalism can work great for price reduction but one way to do price reduction is quality reduction. If the whole non-luxury market is focusing on price reduction and the easiest way is to achieve that is quality reduction then guess what happens. On the other hand, if quality has to hold constant -- which happens when consumers are less price sensitive and won't go for a slightly cheaper option when competitor tries quality drop -- you have to research and build better and/or cheaper. BUT if most major players try the same strategy of quality reduction at the same time then consumers never get the chance to indicate to the market that they value quality. > A Wall Street banker doesn’t have a carbon footprint that much higher than a regular person. Maybe even less. Maybe don't guess and check first. We're on the internet, you don't have to respond immediately and state something that is verifiably false. While we don't have good refined data on specific jobs, there is strong correlation with wealth levels and specifically consumption rates. But if you're modeling a Wall Street banker as someone who works all day, takes the subway, sleeps, and never takes vacation then sure, that's lower. But don't confuse the mean and the median. Edit: Taking our analogy from above: if all producers simultaneously have to do "x" then all consumers automatically also choose "x". This is where regulation can play a role since you can do things like "all cars must get at least 50mpg" or have a more market driven approach like "$100 fee per ton CO2eq" and use that fee to perform such actions like sequestration and/or research to make sequestration effective and cheap.
- tonyedgecombe 3y ago
  >Consumers can only buy what's available. We live in an era of unprecedented consumer choice. Especially for the rich who you rightly pointed out are the source of the problems we are trying to ameliorate.
  - godelski 3y ago
    > We live in an era of unprecedented consumer choice. In some ways yes, in some ways no. Markets aren't exclusively driven by consumers and such framing is incredibly naive. You can't buy the fruit that doesn't exist.
jabradoodle 3y ago
Sorry but this is insane. I want electricity, or more accurately I want to heat my home, wash my clothes, etc. It is not my consumption that has caused us to continue subsiding oil and not investing properly in renewables for over half a century.

solardev 3y ago

What do you mean? Aren't consumers usually on the trailing end of these sorts of things? In the US at least, and especially the West Coast, things like SEER (HVAC efficiency) and CAFE standards (car fuel economy) have been steadily rising, at least until Republican officials push back. Building codes include better and better rules for renewable energy production, insulation, etc. In the private sector things like LEED encourage buildings to utilize better materials, passive heating and cooling, water management, etc. Those are all constraints on the manufacturers and companies. Where consumers are encouraged to change to newer appliances, grants usually help cover the costs of new fridges, LED lights, HVAC equipment, sprinklers, etc. Heat pumps as a consumer phenomenon didn't even catch on until very recently, decades after regulations spurred market innovation. Maybe it works differently in Germany, but here at least it seems like we go way out of our way to incentivize consumer behavior over decades instead of forcing through overnight changes. Could it be a marketing issue, where governments and manufacturers making these iterative changes don't really broadcast them to the public at large, such that when the changes finally hit the average homeowner, they are still caught by surprise? To them it might seem like a sudden change even though it's been happening behind the scenes for years?

michaelt 3y ago
It depends on how you want to attribute carbon emissions. If Brits want to hear a Taylor Swift concert, and Swift's private jet crosses the Atlantic twice emitting 700 tonnes of CO2 emissions in the process - are those Swift's emissions? Or have 900,000 concertgoers each emitted 7kg of CO2, equivalent to driving 2 miles? What about if, instead of Taylor Swift tickets, we consider electricity? More consumption directly increases the power plant's emissions - but consumers can't control whether coal, gas, nuclear or solar supplies their power. If you take the view that corporations' emissions are attributable to the corporation, not their customers - then corporations are much, much less green than consumers. And we'd need to focus more on emissions by giant corporations, and less on plastic straw bans.
- solardev 3y ago
  I get what you're saying, but I think it's less about assigning blame in a "us vs them" situation and more of a "how can we clean up the whole system lifecycle" question. The CAFE model seems to work for that. It doesn't really matter whether it's the driver or the car manufacturer, taxpayers front the regulatory research and costs, manufacturers moan and whine then eventually comply to some degree, consumers buy cars with slightly better mileage each year, over time things get better. Then Tesla comes around and makes electrification a reality, etc. Similarly with the solar market, subsidies spurred investment and research and deployment and helped foster growth, until there is so much of it that (say) California's grid can hardly keep up, China saw the market and took it over, etc. These days it's a commodity. Government carrots do work, is all I'm saying. You can create demands and markets through planned public investments. Sometimes, though, we do blame fossil fuels companies, whether they're using tankers or oil rigs or pipelines. Sometimes those controversies can help spur better protections and safety regulations and whatnot, but at the end of the day your point stands: from a climatic standpoint the emissions are there whether we attribute it to a single company or a million individuals. Maybe the accounting is different and helps different political players, but the atmosphere doesn't care how we divvy it up. IMO Taylor Swift flying in a private jet isn't that different than, say, OpenAI making a bunch of CO2 for a product that millions of people end up using, or Larian spending a bazillion CPU and GPU hours to make Baldur's Gate, or some politico flying back and forth to attend climate meetings. At the other extreme, Greta sails low impact and has great marketing, but that only goes so far. We still need everyday solutions that mid size companies and governments can implement on actionable timescales. That typically means low hanging fruits like more solar, more batteries, occasionally nuclear, incremental standards, etc. Is it enough? No, not nearly. But I think it's more than we've gotten from, say, Greenpeace or PETA. People generally respond better and faster to carrots than disciplinary punishments...

paulcole 3y ago

“Consumers contribute just a small percentage of the problem” is only true if you believe 100% is a small percentage. This is the attitude that shows that “fixing” climate change is doomed. Everybody can find somebody else who’s “worse” to blame the problem on and so they justify doing nothing themselves.

callalex 3y ago

The whole “corporations are the real polluters” is absolute political nonsense that people lie to themselves about to justify their own lazy resistance to change. It’s not like Shell pumps oil out of the ground because they think it’s fun, they do it because people buy the oil to transport themselves and heat their home. It’s not like coca-cola wakes up every morning and thinks “wow I wish there was more plastic litter” they make beverages that people purchase and drink. It’s not like steel companies just really get their giggles from turning rocks into liquid by using a ton of energy, they are making washing machines and stoves and trains that people use to live their life.

paulcole 3y ago
100% correct take and it’s no surprise you’re downvoted with no replies. I understand why people cry that “corporations are the problem” but I can’t believe that deep down they believe it.
- tonyedgecombe 3y ago
  It's not that surprising. Not only do they absolve themselves of any blame but they also get to point the finger at somebody else.
akamaka 3y ago
That’s not taking into account that there is a vast difference in how much pollution is emitted by different oil producers during extraction and refining. Some companies have invested into cleaning up their operations, while dirtier oil sources emit a full 1/3rd of their total pollution before the fuel even arrives at the gas pump.
jabradoodle 3y ago
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/ExxonMobil_climate_change_denial https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/ExxonMobil_climate_change_de...
whelp_24 3y ago
The personal responsibility theory of pollution was made up by these corporations you are defending. The reason that companies make products is to sell them yes. But the reason the products are made in polluting ways and with essentially unrecylable materials is cost cutting. Regulate industries to use the more expensive but less impactful production methods, and you find that pollution will actually go down in a way that matters. Tell individuals to stop buying plastic bottles and you'll get a subset of the middle to upper class to somewhat comply. Make plastic bottles illegal (or at least mandate that the company buy them back to really recycle) and the problem becomes moot, it's not like individuals can make plastic. Same for fuel, waste disposal, etc, etc. The only thing consumers could do is buy less, but life makes that rather hard. The companies that you are trying to absolve lobby to make that harder.

Glench 3y ago

> This is the problem. Putting so much of the burden on the consumer and hardly any on the manufacturers, companies and so on. Between space heating, transportation, water heating, and cooking, about 42% of energy-related emissions are things that consumers have some control over in their homes. We have to decarbonize both the supply side (which is happening super rapidly with wind/solar) as well as the demand side (which is much harder because it requires coordinated action across millions of people). And we have to do this incredibly swiftly to keep a livable climate. Source: https://www.rewiringamerica.org/pace https://www.rewiringamerica.org/pace