[eldaisfish]

We really need to stop placing the burden on the individual. You and I not using cars or minimising our use may help but cars are a necessity of life for many. This is true in urban and rural contexts alike.

What we should be doing is getting governments to band together and penalise industrial-scale polluters. It would do more good to take shipping and trucking electric than for you to rely on public transit and for me to drive one fewer kilometre.

[realce]

> We really need to stop placing the burden on the individual.

That's the person who incentivized the polluters to pollute in the first place. The individual had no standards except an expanding "quality of life" and they were given just what they demanded: consumption without regard for consequence. This attitude perpetuates it.

You vote with your dollars. Our current corporate players are who we paid them to be.

[spaced-out]

The average person is focused on problems in their own life and doesn't have time to keep track of every dollar they spend and what it supports.

When a hole was developing in the ozone layer advocates spent years trying to get people to stop buying the chemicals that were responsible, to no avail. Same with the issue of lead in gasoline and white phosphorous in matches. The solution in all those cases was to simply pass laws to stop a handful of companies from producing those products rather than try to raise awareness in millions of people.

[kfarr]

> What we should be doing is getting governments to band together and penalise industrial-scale polluters.

I agree with this as well. We should do all of the above.

[thehappypm]

This doesn’t really work in a democracy. Look how high gas prices have turned so many Americans against Biden, and that isn’t because of some anti-climate-change policy. Try to fight climate change at the ballot box, next election you lose all your seats as more people want $2 gas than care about the environment.

[nickff]

Industrial-scale polluters are often catering to consumer-level demand. Clamping down on industry may be easier, but it will restrict the consumer (either via reduced selection or increased prices). Individual-level voluntary action has the benefits of being more flexible and less tyrannical.

[eropple]

> Individual-level voluntary action has the benefits of being more flexible and less tyrannical.

It also doesn't work, while serving as a political shield to protect industrial-scale polluters. But it allows you to deliver with hauteur, so it passes generally without comment and things continue to get worse.

[SuoDuanDao]

I would argue though, that if politics really is downstream from culture, that there needs to first be a robust culture that is anticonsumerist. These cultures exist, the FIRE set being the most clear-eyed to my way of thinking. If there is no culture that is willing to unplug from the destructive systems, there's no viable political movement either.

[mcv]

Reducing car use is of course a good idea, but it's not enough, and it feels rather pointless if everybody else, especially corporations, continues to pollute like it doesn't matter. Measures need to have teeth. Pollution needs to be taxed with the amount necessary to reverse it.

[trinovantes]

> cars are a necessity of life

The problem is this mindset. Build better and more sustainable cities instead of the suburban hell that is in most of North America

[eropple]

This comment is unhelpful and ineffective, for if it were so easy, it would be done already. People have to live with the decisions that their grandparents' generation made because the inertia of it puts it firmly out of the reach of the individual.

[kfarr]

We do NOT have to live with the decisions of our grandparents. We can change the world.

[eropple]

You get that we're talking about individual "responsibility" versus collective mass impact, yeah?

There aren't enough sufficiently-walking-friendly places to live at affordable enough rates to support most individuals in the United States going "welp, guess I'm not gonna drive". Devolving to individuals erases responsibility at levels where the necessary power actually exists.

[chapium]

Individuals run corporations and collectively we make decisions. Cars are a necessity for some, but many can find alternatives or lobby their local governments to improve alternate forms of transit.

[lotsofpulp]

That would piss off "the individual" because it would result in higher prices and hence lower consumption and hence lower quality of life.