This crisis will not be solved without a good heaping helping of both personal responsibility and aggressive government regulation.
100%. People usually argue for one to the exclusion of the other but we need both.
Only one actually works.
You can do personal responsibility alone all you want. Nobody will join you. Government regulation affects everyone.
Selling people on personal responsibility is what the oil companies want, because they know it doesn’t work. It gives you the chance to be high and mighty, while nobody else reduces their consumption, so their profits stay the same.
Definitely consume less if you can, but don’t delude yourself into thinking that individual actions in reducing personal consumption achieve anything. Go out there and vote for politicians who propose better climate policies, maybe assassinate some oil, gas and coal company execs, etc.
Not to mention that we could organise for every one of the seven or eight billion people on the planet to take ‘personal responsibility’ and it would still leave 70%+ of emissions untouched. Not even close to where we need to be.
That part is not true.
If we COULD organise every single person to consume as little as possible (in terms of goods, fuel, electricity and services), that would mean that all those polluting companies have nobody left to produce stuff for. The 70% number doesn’t exist in a vacuum, it’s still people who buy all the shit. It’s just impossible to get enough people to stop buying stuff without a carbon tax and other rules that increase the cost of pollution.
Did you just completely not read the context of the conversation that prompted my comment? At all? You seriously just pulled my comment out of context, made a straw man out of it, and started arguing. What the actual tittyfucking Christ.
