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Comment by false-mirror | Hacker News Reader

Remember that only 100 companies are responsible for 71% of climate change.

Obsessing with personal lifestyle changes will burn you out and have very little payoff. Sure if public transit or going vegan is easy for ya, then definitely go for it-- but save your energy for political activism imo. Power structures inform lifestyles more than the other way around.

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Yea but if American Airlines refuses to fly me to Santornini for vacation to save the planet, I'm going to fly United instead. So who is really responsible for that climate change? Me or the airline? I think it's pretty much me unless they are being wasteful.

And if you just say "shut them both down" then you are pretty much just forcing personal lifestyle changes.

Consumer demand must drive nearly all carbon use right?

That's a very market-centric viewpoint. I agree individuals should reduce their footprint, however govts and corporations are very thirsty for energy-hungry activities (military, infrastructure, not to mention subsidies/corruption) that the people themselves had no say in. Consumers are important, but many other factors drive carbon emissions, too.

Ideally, we'd just have a carbon tax on any emitting behavior, that way govts, corporations, and citizens alike are all incentivized to clean up their act.

> Remember that only 100 companies are responsible for 71% of climate change.

That has to be one of the most misleading statistics I've ever heard. The source of this appears to be here[0], they are assigning all emissions of products to the source company. e.g. the emissions from the gas an individual uses is assigned to the company that pulled the oil out of the ground.

[0] PDF - https://b8f65cb373b1b7b15feb-c70d8ead6ced550b4d987d7c03fcdd1...

Remember that lifestyles is actually what pull those companies production. It's easy to lower your environmental fingerprint to 5% of the average in first-world countries, if most people do this, the change is just massive

No offense, but we are going nowhere with your mentality

They're correct actually. We've been overcompensating on personal responsibility, but changing personal behaviors won't save us from climate change. It's not enough. We need massive political mobilization and aggressive government action.

We can both reduce individual footprints AND have companies reduce their footprints. No need for either/or thinking here.

What we're talking about is putting a halt to expending political capital on shaming people into being "green," "eco-friendly," or "sustainable" to save "the environment" and instead recognizing that we need drastic action to remove literally billions of people from grave danger. We're not going to ask companies to reduce footprints, we need to decimate the fossil fuel industry as fast as possible or we're cooked.

Also, most of the actions of these companies are heavily subsidized by the government. We tend to overstate market importance and understate government involvement. So while we as individuals have some control via spending habits, we have very little control over what is actually offered in the market. The fact that we can buy phones and computers isn't because of market forces, but decades upon decades of government investment and subsidy. Which if it didn't exist there would be no phones or computers.

So I say, start at the source, at investment and government involvement which will ultimately decide what is available in the markets.

It's convenient to blame someone else and thereby excuse your own behavior, isn't it? I mean, why should you have to sacrifice anything? We all share the responsibility for this, those companies don't exist without people buying their products.

Why should only some of us sacrifice? Aren't we all in this together? We need regulation that will change the carbon output of every single company, government agency, and individual, not the small attempts of a few green-minded individuals in their personal lives. "Personal responsibility" is just a thinly veiled anti-regulation and anti-government position. The only way out of this is government, unless you believe in technological leprechauns and unicorns, which I do not.

I'm not saying regulation isn't necessary, what I'm saying is that it shouldn't be an excuse to continue on as we are. If you're unwilling to sacrifice, and so is everyone else, how do you expect anything to get any better?

> Remember that only 100 companies are responsible for 71% of climate change.

How many companies does it take to account for 71% of the world's economy?

Is the answer to this question likely to be all that meaningful?

Let's say it's 100. Unless you're confident that the lists would be identical then would we really have learned anything?

I think that if there's significant overlap - or if the top 100 companies by economic output produce a large fraction of total CO2 (say, more than 1/3) then it's just a measure of centralization, not of blame.

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