Shout out to all of us who buy anything shipped, any petroleum or oil-based products and those of us who aren’t vegan
I mean, you’re technically right but that also isn’t a helpful mentality. No one individual can single-handedly stop climate change by living in a more environmentally conscious way, we have to come together and implement systemic solutions in order for things to change.
I might be erring on the naive side here, but I read the comment you replied to less as holier than thou and more as ‘shout out to us all’.
Either that or they don’t understand that even posting the comment involves using lots of petroleum products to create the magic box that browses lemmy. And the magic boxes that host the lemmy content. And the magic boxes that connect the previous two.
Systemic problems require systematic changes
The whole “individual carbon footprint” thing is crazy when you look at the amount of emissions emitted by major corporations.
Hell the largest 16 cargo ships emit more CO2 than the all the cars in the world.
We got blamed for climate change for using plastic straws when when we go out to eat once a week and the companies causing the real destruction slipped under the radar.
I 100% believe the plastic straw thing was an intentional distraction to 1. get us to fight amongst ourselves, pointing the finger at one another rather than coming together to actually solve the problem, and 2. allow a few companies to solve an easy to solve problem by using PLA (corn-based plastic) or paper straws and then sniffing their own farts for it and ignore the real problem.
I absolutely agree about systematic change. But pointing at an oil company and saying “look this is the organisation responsible for climate change” is to misidentify the problem in my opinion. Setting aside for a moment the misinformation that the oil companies funded regarding climate change, which - yes - I would like to see people in prison for - the main problem, I think is that we are still very dependent on oil.
We’ll remain dependent on oil until there is concerted government action. That action will require that we change our lifestyles and are probably a bit poorer, more constrained. No-one will vote those governments in. So, we’ll sit here like boiled frogs
government action will also require eradicating corruption as big oil will always try to influence legislation in their favor
