These companies are responsible for creating a catastrophe on a global scale. We might literally go extinct because of them. All their assets should be seized to repair the damage, and people responsible should be tried for crimes against humanity.
Blaming the consumer for buying bad shit when there is not only no equivalent on the market, but an active campaign to supress any alternatives is simply being dishonest.
And I am forced to buy their products. I need my car to get to work. I can't afford an electric vehicle. If I don't work, I can't have a home or eat. Thus my choice becomes: consume oil or die.
For the past 7 years, I've been able to walk/bike/take the bus to work instead of the car. And this isn't even in a walkable urbanist utopia.
You chose to live and work in places that require a car to get to work. You probably eliminated all the options that would have enabled you to not use a car, and society does not make it easy to make that choice. But that choice still does exist.
This is the problem with the rhetoric that seeks to place the entire blame for our fossil-fuel dependence on Big Oil: it ignores the fact that most of those lifestyle decisions were made without the influence of the oil industry, and often in pursuit of other goals. It wasn't Standard Oil who said "gee, let's decamp people from the inner cities into these large sprawls of white-picket-fence housing tracts"--that was real estate developers who pushed for that. Nor did Standard Oil cause the decline of streetcars, commuter rail, and interurban rail service: that was a vicious ridership/profit death spiral, somewhat helped by GM specifically but more heavily caused by an overregulated rail industry in comparison to the underregulated private automotive transit.
There's a lot of blame to go around. Don't pretend that we, as a general society, deserve none of it.
You're making my point for me. The individual has little culpability in oil consumption when their homes are built far away from their jobs due to real estate developers. Nor are they culpable for not taking public transit when those systems are utterly eroded by private interests. It may not have been big oils direct actions that led to these conditions, but that doesn't change the fact that the individuals who live under them can be blamed for living under them. Sure, I guess we can give them some flak for not changing the conditions by rising up and seizing control of the resources that make their conditions so existentially dire, but then, that's exactly what the original op was saying.
Meanwhile, the idea that this problem can be solved by individual efforts is laughable. To address these issues we need to fundamentally restructure our society. The idea of constant growth and consumerism is incompatible with our long term survival.
When crimes are perpetrated by extremely large numbers of people, you can't punish them all. You have to limit yourself to punishing the organizers, and forgive the rest. In this case, the organizers are the leaders in the fossil fuel industry.
And it's not true that consumers are equally guilty as fossil fuel executives. More than 70% of global emissions come from just 100 companies: https://www.theguardian.com/sustainable-business/2017/jul/10... The blame should be concentrated at the top, even if we are all somewhat guilty.
https://www.livescience.com/44330-jurassic-dinosaur-carbon-d...
In fact it's the plant matter from this very era that created oil in the first place...
I'm going to cry in the darkness now.
I think shy of a meteor hitting the planet, we'll be fine. We still might suffer big consequences, if sea levels rise too much and whole cities get displaced, but extinction is not even within 1/10th of a percent of chance of happening.
Hisory has many lessons of civilizations collapsing, you might read up on Jared Diamond's Collapse or Joseph Tainter's earlier work. A lot of these past civilizations had all the ingredients to make it, but ended up destroying themselves.
This is not true.
Here is a plausible scenario for complete human extinction due to excess CO2 in the atmosphere and oceans:
https://link.springer.com/article/10.1007%2Fs12576-016-0501-...
For me it's just a matter of time until the damage of our predatory overcultivation catches up with us in a systemic and global ecosystem collapse. There's only so much damage an ecosystem can absorb before it gives in and there are quite some indications (i.e. the "Insect Apocalypse") that we are reaching the tipping point. Just think about it; how can an ecosystem support humans, if it can't support insects anymore? And I'm not only talking about flying insects but everything in our agricultural support system; e.g. soil.
Again; please disprove the 'hyperbole', I'd be really glad.