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It Is No Longer Possible to Escape What We Have Done to Ourselves
(www.nytimes.com)
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this post was submitted on 23 Aug 2023
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And who bought the gas? Who bought the oil? Who bought the plastic made from the oil? Who bought the food grown from the fertilizer made from the oil?
If you don't live on North Sentinel Island your entire life relies on the products of the corporations that have destroyed the environment. You are complicit. Your parents were complicit. Your children, if any, will be complicit.
Blaming corporations or capitalism or "big oil" is just a way of dodging personal responsibility. It's an excuse for not making inconvenient personal changes in your own lifestyle. It lets you tell yourself that when big corporations consume so much there is no point in you lowering your standard of living to consume less.
The fact that corporations are worse than you does not absolve you of your responsibility for your own decisions and your own environmental sins. We all have to do better.
You have to be incredibly naive to think a systemic problem can be solved by individual lifestyle changes
Systemic problems need political fixes. Political fixes require collective action. And collective action is the sum total of individual lifestyle choices.
If you want government to act on the environment you need a critical mass of voters who put the environment first and punish politicians at the ballot box if they don't.
If you want corporations to act on the environment you need a critical mass of consumers who refuse to buy from corps that don't.
And you get to that critical mass by living your values and converting other people to those values.
So yeah, your asking for a paper straw doesn't make an impact. You being part of hundreds of thousands of people all asking for paper straws tells Starbucks they better pay attention.
Big oil companies witheld critical data on impact of fossil fuels on climate change. Source
You go ahead and use paper straws all you like if it will give you a moral high ground and let you shit on people like you just tried on me. It will clear your conscience and will help you consider yourself soo much better than the rest. The fact remains - massive corporations do the most damage and will do fuck all to fix it up by, oh, I don't know, changing their production methods, switching to renewables etc. But yeah, sure, it's my fault.
There are plenty of alternatives to oil that dont require destroying the environment. We as the consumers cant really force them to stop using oil. Theres plenty of groups out there dedicated to stoppi g the use of oil but they are mostly ignored.
You cant say we should all stop using oil and then they will change, because we rely on oil to live our lives. The change has to be made by the corporations. Like the change to EVs that will help with carbon emmisions.
Frankly if the only reason a big company wont switch to greener alternatives to oil is a hit to their profits then i have absolutely no sympathy. They can get fucked. Greedy fuckers.