Humans have caused 1.5 °C of long-term global warming according to new estimates

One person's individual change is a drop of water in the ocean when compared to the vast amount of emissions and pollution and waste produced at scale by corporations.

Arguing to your neighbor why they should recycle their plastic water bottle can at most make an infinitesimal difference.

Creating a legal responsibility for Coca Cola to clean up the billions of plastic bottles it produces annually, on the other hand, could change the world.

> Creating a legal responsibility for Coca Cola to clean up the billions of plastic bottles it produces annually, on the other hand, could change the world.

It would change the world in a sense of Coca Cola either going bankrupt, or shrinking to the point of irrelevance, succumbing to competitive pressure of corporations that aren't forced to do such cleanups.

Edit: Do better, HN. Explain why you disagree. This argument is a delusional meme, as if people were not the primary consumers of corporations' products. Corporations are reactionary at best and believing there's 0% responsibility on the consumer is a 5 year old child mentality.

> One person's individual change is a drop of water in the ocean when compared to the vast amount of emissions and pollution and waste produced at scale by corporations.

With emphasis on "One".

There's 8 billion of us; our diets have varied environmental impacts; and collectively agriculture is, though not the biggest problem, a big enough problem that we can't solve climate change without also fixing it.

https://ourworldindata.org/emissions-by-sector

Also, the problem with framing it as the fault of corporations, is that the corporations do what they do in response to demand.

And the laws come with costs: this is a perennial issue during elections and "over-regulation" has been the battle cry of UK and US conservatives for as long as I've been paying attention to politics — so sure, if I was world dictator I could make it happen (and build a global power grid for green energy, we don't even need superconductors for that), but that's not the world we live in.

Making a convincing reason for consumers to demand different things, or for business to choose sustainability just because it's cheaper, or shifting the Overton Window so the relevant laws aren't just a political football, that's hard.

If they aren't profitable when taking into account their negative externalities than the owners are stealing from the rest of the world and they should go bankrupt. They'd probably figure out a better way to do business instead though

The incoming government in America loves the idea of tariffs; why not frame it as part of a trade war in a theoretical government set on ending climate change? Place heavy tariffs on any goods that do not have the same cleanup obligations.

I don’t understand these attempts to wave away personal responsibility, and pin the whole thing on corporations.

It’s both. We need corporations to emit less, and they are the biggest emitters, and they do what they do for two reasons:

1. They are permitted to. Yes, government needs to intervene and prevent some of the things they do.

2. People keep giving them money, rewarding their bad behavior and providing them the means and motive to keep doing it.

We need the populace to want to make change, by voting for legislators that pass laws limiting corporations and by voting with their wallets. These usually go hand in hand.

I know there are people who vote for legislators/laws that limit consumption, who don’t make any effort to limit consumption themselves, but I don’t think there’s that many. People generally don’t want laws that change the way they are living, they want laws that make other people live the way they are living.

We don’t need to shame people for consumption, that isn’t helpful, but writing off personal responsibility is also unhelpful.

That seems like a convenient way to not change anything. I guarantee most people would still complain heavily if the price of meat went up because something like a carbon tax were applied to it, even though the effect would be to reduce the meat consumption of the entire population. The politicians who implemented that would be voted out instantly.

> I know there are people who vote for legislators/laws that limit consumption, who don’t make any effort to limit consumption themselves, but I don’t think there’s that many. People generally don’t want laws that change the way they are living, they want laws that make other people live the way they are living.

There is nothing wrong with this behavior. I will vote today for everyone to curb consumption, but I see no reason to make the sacrifice alone.

I am not coming at it from a moral view, simply a practical one: I don’t think many people can sustain this dissonance. I don’t think people are very motivated to vote for things that would make them change their daily life.

There are examples that would show me wrong, like plastic grocery bag bans. But on the other hand, there haven’t been very many such bans, and banning plastic bags is a relatively minor inconvenience, and does very little to slow climate change.

This is basically Downs’ paradox. Only systemic change can turn things around, but any given individual’s responsibility for systemic change is generally negligible.

> I am not coming at it from a moral view, simply a practical one: I don’t think many people can sustain this dissonance.

This is assuming that the dissonance is hurting more than the renunciation. People are already quite good at ignoring dissonances. And the causal effects are so removed from daily experience that often there isn’t that great of a dissonance in the first place.

> This is assuming that the dissonance is hurting more than the renunciation.

It’s not about “the dissonance is painful, so they seek to correct it by not voting for reduced consumption”.

It’s “voting to reduce consumption takes effort, in knowing what to vote for and in actually casting a vote, and people are unlikely to put in that effort if they are not putting in any effort elsewhere”.

“Dissonance” was a poor choice of words for what I was trying to communicate.

I thought you were talking about the dissonance of voting for renunciation while not voluntarily renouncing until forced by the system. I don’t think it’s uncommon.

I don't understand why enacting a 20% tariff on all imports makes sense, but enacting a 20% carbon tax on every company in order to pay off the damage of pollution is literally unthinkable and would cause every company to go under.

The days of letting companies do whatever the fuck they want and doing nothing to steer their incentives in the right direction are gone. It doesn't work, end of. We need to nudge them to do the right thing, and the only thing humans care about is money.

tariffs are there to give Western oligarchs an extra stipend in the form of more competitive pricing without the work. a carbon tax would punish Western oligarchs along with eastern ones, and therefore not acceptable.

Honestly I doubt it, because these Western oligarchs rely on cheaper labor and manufacturing in Eastern countries. I don't think any domestic companies will be able to compete even with the tariffs.