Yeah I agree. But I could have chosen more fuel efficient cars when I was younger. Bought less shit I didn’t need. I could’ve done more. Yeah it’s not entirely my fault, we’ve been thrown into the gauntlet, what can you do if you wanna live? But the children born now, or God forbid even later are going to find themselves in a hellscape of an economy and ecosystem. And my heart goes out to them because they’ll get less than I had, less freedom, less upward mobility, less drinkable water, less food, less breathable air, and be more fucked by everything. The longer we push it, the worse it gets for the people who had less to do with it.
If it helps to assuage your guilt at all, we have been living, inundated with corporate propaganda, for all our lives.
“Carbon footprint” is a great example; it’s a Corporate guilt trip.
Oh absolutely. The carbon footprint was bullshit from the oil companies to put the onus on individuals to fix it while not giving people any options. It was all bullshit. That being said, I do have some guilt. Or at least feel it. Less because I was making bad decisions and more of a “survivors guilt” kind of thing. That’s not the right term, cause I’m going to die before the younger generations. But I feel guilt just because my child and millions of others will get a worse and worse end of the stick than I got just because of when they were born. This is why I argue with boomers about the difference between generations.
Like, you had the American dream fucking handed to you. Do you not feel some kind of guilt for getting a degree for $8k, a house for $35k, and a top of the line vette costing $4.5k? Even at the lower rates of pay, that’s a fraction of the budget compared to today. If I had it that easy, I would absolutely feel bad for people coming up behind me. And yet, VERY few boomers acknowledge this, and that is why I’m so hostile to them.
“Generation Me” will never cop to their culpability. They’re narcissists, ie to admit being wrong now would absolutely crumple their sense of identity. And we all know Boomers #1 rule is looking out for numero uno.
I’m not saying all Boomers are Captain Planet villains…but all Captain Planet villains were definitely Boomers.
Respectfully, carbon footprint as a measure is just a measurement and is really useful in the right context. It’s important to remember that it’s the misapplication to individuals that is a con game.
When Rees and Wackernagel came up with ecological footprint as a measure, it introduced a systems analysis to human activity that we really needed. Carbon footprint is just a subset of that and ignoring it is futile. Just apply the analysis where it matters: militaries, mining, transport, energy, civil engineering, etc etc.
