[ben_w]

No single person — no single nation, even — bears quite that much responsibility for climate change, let alone the other things. Too many people did too much for too long, the blame is diffuse over all of us.

But yes, we are a bit short on metaphorical oxygen masks.

[giraffe_lady]

Of course no single person or single group bears all of the responsibility, I was leaning on the already established mask metaphor in this conversation.

But if you mean "all of us" as in all people in the world? No we are absolutely not all equally to blame for this. And it is true that, overall, in general, the ones who disproportionately caused this, and disproportionally benefitted from it, will also be disproportionally protected from its worst effects.

Focusing on the diffusion of blame or the weakness of the metaphor without acknowledging that dynamic is cowardly imo.

[ben_w]

Diffusion does not mean equality.

However, I would be surprised if more than a mere few million humans alive today are sufficiently harmless to the ecosystem that they can be counted as blameless. While I would of course accept that minors can’t be counted as at fault due to lack of power or awareness, I would say that in practice this also applies to virtually everyone, given the safe emissions level is 0.1% of actual emissions and that this means that even most eco-friendly food production isn’t friendly enough yet, let alone all the other things.

Still, I recon we can get there without loss of quality of life. I may be pessimistic about politics, but I’m optimistic about technology.