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here is a gift in the form of an unfinished post (because the whole thing started because i think JES might actually be retarded): https://puu.sh/sR3xH/1b050d6ce5.png

key thing: i am not absolving firms from any fault in climate change

i spent a solid 20 minutes getting reamed about that on discord even though i'm not sure how one can get to that point out of my statement

this is a hard question because like it is mainly the big companies fault but that is an undisputed, square-one premise. ppl forget that big companies are made up of people responding p rationally to self-promotion incentives - that they arent anything but people like you or me. it's easier to hate the other, corporations as entities unto themselves rather than the controlling factors of a system we're all part of, and any suggestion that questions that tenuous bit of mental separation is met with backlash that isnt rlly based in reason. no1 wants to aid or abet evil, even implicitly

idk if what i said made sense. but my reading of ur post was: it is incorrect to look at climate change and say "THEY did it!" where "they" is wealthy corpodudes and executives, when the correct take is "THEY did it by selling us - normal people - things we wanted to buy to make our lives supposedly better"

you did in fact get the correct reading! the great economist partha dasgupta recently authored a paper in the Environmental and Resource Economics titled "Consumer Behaviour with Environmental and Social Externalities: Implications for Analysis and Policy" which goes in to great detail about this very subject. The great conclusion is that "Finally we showed that altruism may have no effect on people’s consumption (and any resulting environmental damage) and what matters more is to persuade individuals to act more morally rather than to become more altruistic; even if that can be done"