The state has the money and resources to force companies to produce more sustainable products. The individual does not. A million individual boycotts(side note: boycott meaning “not buying” is a corruption of the term, a boycott also necessarily includes public shaming of, and refusal to interact with, the individuals and companies in question) does nothing to a company who sells their products to a quarter of a billion people or more. A single government regulation requiring companies to completely ditch single use plastics immediately does more than even 100 million individual consumer boycotts. Such measures as are needed are supported in the vast majority of cases by the majority of the population, however, our political system is not predicated on individual Democracy, but specifically on elite rule over the majority (as outlined in The Federalist Papers and entrenched through many laws and court rulings since), and so unless the system is altered at a fundamental level, we will continue to see the government prioritize capital over sustainability.
Right so you want to eliminate oil production and make gas simply unavailable to consumers.
I think about this a lot. We’re past the point of a painless transition. There is no such thing. It’s just a matter of whether we do it now and minimize the pain, or do it later once it’s too late.
What I mean by that is… cars are unsustainable, full stop. Our transition COULD look like… stop subsidizing gas, let the prices rise and put pressure on consumers causing them to minimize unnecessary travel and demand better alternatives, so that we eventually get the walkable cities with public transportation that can be sustainable. OR we can keep going as we are today until it becomes completely untenable and then have to transition suddenly all at once resulting in mass chaos and huge swaths of totally unlivable land, a fresh collapse of the real estate markets, and even more insane housing prices in cities.
Of course, I’m still painting a rosy picture. We all know that if gas prices rise, most people will not react rationally but instead will pressure politicians to put the subsidies back in place. So we’re well and truly fucked.
No, i want a shift towards an society that doesn’t rely so heavily upon petroleum products and natural gas.
I’d even take one that, say, taxes oil and gas corporations to pay for massive infrastructure projects to create sustainable mass transit nationwide and provide retraining for millions of O&G workers.
Or possibly one that uses its tax money to determine which single use plastics are necessary (eg. Sterile medical syringes etc), and then, having made that determination, bans industry from utilizing them in any other instance.
Really, we start getting to the heart of the matter when the government starts taxing industry and directly using that to retrofit residences and small commercial properties with sustainable infrastructure. Solar panels, water reclamation and irrigation, conversion of grass lawns to mixed use permaculture or xeriscaping as needed, multi-paned windows, insulation, breezeways, etc etc.
You want companies to be held responsible for gas being burned, there’s no way that responsibility isnt handled that doesnt make gas unavailable to people. Either banning it outright, or in your case taxing it away, the outcome is the same. It’s just not possible to reduce gas production and not affect consumers.
The only way this goes smoothly is consumers reducing demand.
