this post was submitted on 07 Oct 2023
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Company emissions and consumer emissions are the same emissions. When tallying the emissions for an oil company, theyre tallying the gasoline you are burning in your car.
The state has the money and resources to force companies to produce more sustainable products. The individual does not. A million individual boycotts(side note: boycott meaning “not buying” is a corruption of the term, a boycott also necessarily includes public shaming of, and refusal to interact with, the individuals and companies in question) does nothing to a company who sells their products to a quarter of a billion people or more. A single government regulation requiring companies to completely ditch single use plastics immediately does more than even 100 million individual consumer boycotts. Such measures as are needed are supported in the vast majority of cases by the majority of the population, however, our political system is not predicated on individual Democracy, but specifically on elite rule over the majority (as outlined in The Federalist Papers and entrenched through many laws and court rulings since), and so unless the system is altered at a fundamental level, we will continue to see the government prioritize capital over sustainability.
Right so you want to eliminate oil production and make gas simply unavailable to consumers.
I think about this a lot. We're past the point of a painless transition. There is no such thing. It's just a matter of whether we do it now and minimize the pain, or do it later once it's too late.
What I mean by that is... cars are unsustainable, full stop. Our transition COULD look like.. stop subsidizing gas, let the prices rise and put pressure on consumers causing them to minimize unnecessary travel and demand better alternatives, so that we eventually get the walkable cities with public transportation that can be sustainable. OR we can keep going as we are today until it becomes completely untenable and then have to transition suddenly all at once resulting in mass chaos and huge swaths of totally unlivable land, a fresh collapse of the real estate markets, and even more insane housing prices in cities.
Of course, I'm still painting a rosy picture. We all know that if gas prices rise, most people will not react rationally but instead will pressure politicians to put the subsidies back in place. So we're well and truly fucked.
Maybe just NOT subsidizing the fuck out of the oil and gas industry would be a good start.
No, i want a shift towards an society that doesn’t rely so heavily upon petroleum products and natural gas.
I’d even take one that, say, taxes oil and gas corporations to pay for massive infrastructure projects to create sustainable mass transit nationwide and provide retraining for millions of O&G workers.
Or possibly one that uses its tax money to determine which single use plastics are necessary (eg. Sterile medical syringes etc), and then, having made that determination, bans industry from utilizing them in any other instance.
Really, we start getting to the heart of the matter when the government starts taxing industry and directly using that to retrofit residences and small commercial properties with sustainable infrastructure. Solar panels, water reclamation and irrigation, conversion of grass lawns to mixed use permaculture or xeriscaping as needed, multi-paned windows, insulation, breezeways, etc etc.
You want companies to be held responsible for gas being burned, there's no way that responsibility isnt handled that doesnt make gas unavailable to people. Either banning it outright, or in your case taxing it away, the outcome is the same. It's just not possible to reduce gas production and not affect consumers.
The only way this goes smoothly is consumers reducing demand.
When we replace all of the gas ranges in homes, restaurants, etc with electric ones, that creates a reduction in demand. How does someone renting a house with a gas furnace, a gas hot water heater, and a gas range reduce their demand for gas? Just eat less and don’t shower or use heat? It’s absurd to expect individuals to equally share the burden when they don’t equally contribute, nor have equal means available to them.
How does someone making $18,000/year afford to buy an electric car to stop using gasoline, and even if they do, how does that help with tire pollution, which is more than an order of magnitude higher than tailpipe pollution on most modern cars? What products can I buy that are completely void of any unnecessary use of plastic? Which ones that exist aren’t priced higher due to petroleum subsidiaries ensuring they remain the cheapest option for manufacturers to use to package their products?
How does someone living in Compton living a completely sustainable life change Bill Gates flying around in a jet and creating monoculture farms that each do more harm to the environment than the average person? Why is the onus on the average man, when it has been shown repeatedly that the average person uses entire orders of magnitude less than those in upper echelons of society? When people like Kylie Jenner use the equivalent of 40,000 people worth of resources in a week, why wouldn’t we start by leveling the playing field, and ensuring first that some aren’t abusing their privilege while others have not even enough?
the same way they keep buying larger and larger gas trucks and SUV's currently. We are so damn far from your notion that people are doing what they can and just dont have the means to do more. We agree on a lot of stuff, like the importance of public transit and less car-centric city design, but we dont have it because most Americans dont want it. They want more roads and bigger vehicles and cheaper gas.
In fact Im kind of losing motivation to push this, consumer responsibility would be the smoothest way, but I dont have any faith in the US population to even consider doing anything.
You really think the people living on $18,000 are buying $110,000 trucks and $80,000 SUVs? I think you have a warped perspective on the average working class person, and what they have. Look up what the average age of vehicle in service in the US is. Look up the ratio of New: Used cars. The poor aren’t buying new cars, whether that be a Corolla or a F150.
I know they have an insane amount of debt. Also 18k isnt the average, and they dont have to be buying new. US vehicles are becoming increasingly large and theyre not just...spawning out of nothing, people are buying them.
So almost exclusively wealthy people buy new cars, and thus set the trends for desirable features and sizes for manufacturers to make. The rest of the population is forced to play cleanup on the refuse of the wealthy and buy their leftover thrown away vehicles used. Where exactly do regular people have the ability to influence anything there? You could say, buy a smaller car, but they’re already not buying cars at all if they’re really poor, and if they’re moderately poor to even lower middle class, then they’re buying used cars. Neither of those put a single dollar in the pockets of manufacturers, meaning neither of those has ANY influence whatsoever on manufacturers and what they build.
That’s before we get into ways that regulation has made it cheaper, and more profitable, for manufacturers to increase the sizes of their vehicles.
It’s pretty clear you have no theoretical framework or grasp of the systems in place in the US or how they function. I Can recommend some readings if you like, but there is a knowledge gap that you will need to bridge if you hope to ever have meaningful discussions around economics and political economy. Not even the neoliberal economists who implemented “personal responsibility” optics believe in them, as evidenced by their actions and academic works.
Some of the emissions made by companies is as a result of their operations. Sure, Shell's pollution comes partially from cars fueled using Shell gas. OTOH, some of it also comes from huge tanker ships moving oil around the globe. Those tankers burn bunker fuel, which is extra awful for the environment. Theoretically, Shell could reduce its emissions by switching those tankers to use electric power, or they could use sails. But, they can get away with using bunker fuel, and it's cheaper, so that's what they do.
Having said that, if everybody stopped driving, Shell would no longer be burning fuel to move oil around the planet because there would be no market for that oil.
The choices companies make do matter, and generally the choices they make are purely based on profit, ignoring the long-term damage they do to the environment. It might be possible to pass laws that result in those companies switching to environmentally friendly methods of production. But, the governments of the world haven't shown much of an appetite for that.
What's difficult is that if people do stop driving and switch to say, electric bikes, there's no good way of knowing how the electric bike company is from an environmental point of view. Maybe they source their batteries from a battery company that creates massive amounts of pollution in its battery making process. Unfortunately, especially with global supply chains, it's really hard to know as a consumer how bad the companies you're doing business with are to the environment.
I think electric shipping boats would have to be invented first.
And please dont tell me you dont have the critical thinking to figure out e-bike production is better environmentally than gas or even electric cars. Some process in making a bike frame that requires more energy than a car frame?
https://www.sustainable-ships.org/stories/2021/worlds-first-electric-cargo
It should be. But, my point is that you never know. Because consumers have no visibility into the supply chains of the companies they buy from, it could be that the company that makes the batteries uses the dirtiest, oldest coal generator at some stage in the process, and that the highly optimized supply chains for cars are actually better. I doubt it, but as a consumer we don't really have any way to know, which is a problem.
As an example, it would seem crazy that a leaf blower is worse environmentally than a car. Leaf blowers are tiny, portable things, whereas cars have to move tons of steel, plastic and meat around. And, it's true that leaf blowers burn less fuel per hour. OTOH, they use really primitive two-stroke engines that mix oil and fuel together in the combustion chamber and spit up to 1/3 of it out as unburned waste. A car, by contrast, has a catalytic converter, and has to pass rigorous emissions tests before it's allowed out on the road. So, leaf blowers and similar two-stroke engine powered devices are a bigger contributor to smog in California than cars.