A fixation on system change alone opens the door to a kind of cynical self-absolution that divorces personal commitment from political belief. This is its own kind of false consciousness, one that threatens to create a cheapened climate politics incommensurate with this urgent moment.
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Because here’s the thing: When you choose to eat less meat or take the bus instead of driving or have fewer children, you are making a statement that your actions matter, that it’s not too late to avert climate catastrophe, that you have power. To take a measure of personal responsibility for climate change doesn’t have to distract from your political activism—if anything, it amplifies it.
That includes downstream emissions. So if your car runs on BP oil, those emissions would be part of BPs emissions.
There is a reason BP is not advertising people to drop their cars. BP wants two things in its campaign. First of all to make clear that it is your lifestyles fault and secondly that besides munor changes you do not have to change that at all.
They are responsible for those downstream emissions because they entrenched themselves and made it so the majority of people don’t have a choice. Even going so far as to influence how our cities are built to make us dependent on them.
Most people cannot afford to get a car let alone an EV. The only reason we are seeing EVs in the first place is because of government intervention.
If the individual doesn’t have a choice because of choices made by the fossil fuel industry then the individual isn’t responsible for those emissions.
How do people die from not having a car? It must be a lot of them, given that most can not afford them, but depend on them…