Where did I imply that making it so the planet doesnt kill us impacts only the companies?
You implied it when twice you went on long tangents going into the minutiae of the carbon production process while avoiding providing the simple, obvious answer to the question. Why do those companies produce all that carbon? Because they are making things that people want and need.
The problem with this framing is that it implies that climate change exists solely due to a few bad actors, and if we just constrained them or sestroyed them or whatever, then we would all live happily ever after. But this is not the case.
Suppose we round up all the CEOs and major shareholders to these companies tomorrow, and put them on a firing line, and threaten anyone else with the same if they don’t immediately dissolve the companies. Well, after maybe a year or two of a global economic crisis and restructuring of the world’s supply lines, do you think carbon emmissions would have gone down? Probably not. Instead, you would likely have new major players who stepped into the old companies roles. Or maybe now those roles are more dispersed - so instead of 7 companies emmitting all this carbon, we now have 700 million.
Now, I’m not saying that the concentration of global economic power isn’t a problem. But it isn’t the main problem to solve if we want to solve climate change. Because the production of carbon isn’t driven by companies making products, but by consumers demanding products. Nigerians coming out of poverty want dirty two stroke mopeds. Vietnamese pho vendors want propane to power their food carts. Latvian software developers want to display their wealth by driving low end luxury cars. Argentinian housewives want to eat steak for every meal. And remote villiagers in Pakistan want to keep enjoying the power they now have in their homes for only the last few years that comes from the coal plant 100km away. And if we want to snap our fingers and decarbonize the world, then at least some of these people are going to face disruptions to some of these goods.
That doesn’t mean that a decarbonized world has to be worse for everyone. But it means that maybe Latvian software developers need to develop a taste for expensive watches, and maybe Argentinian housewives will need to learn to grill jackfruit, and maybe an NGO needs to pay for rural Pakistanis to have solar panels on their roofs. But the actual number of companies that are the endpoints of pollution based on whatever statistical analysis is fairly irrelivant. Whether it is 7 companies or 700 million, we need to stop the demand for carbon intensive goods that is driving the supply - and that means changing peoples preferences or creating alternatives for those preferences to be met which do not depend on carbon emmissions.
You implied it when twice you went on long tangents going into the minutiae of the carbon production process while avoiding providing the simple, obvious answer to the question. Why do those companies produce all that carbon? Because they are making things that people want and need.
The problem with this framing is that it implies that climate change exists solely due to a few bad actors, and if we just constrained them or sestroyed them or whatever, then we would all live happily ever after. But this is not the case.
Suppose we round up all the CEOs and major shareholders to these companies tomorrow, and put them on a firing line, and threaten anyone else with the same if they don’t immediately dissolve the companies. Well, after maybe a year or two of a global economic crisis and restructuring of the world’s supply lines, do you think carbon emmissions would have gone down? Probably not. Instead, you would likely have new major players who stepped into the old companies roles. Or maybe now those roles are more dispersed - so instead of 7 companies emmitting all this carbon, we now have 700 million.
Now, I’m not saying that the concentration of global economic power isn’t a problem. But it isn’t the main problem to solve if we want to solve climate change. Because the production of carbon isn’t driven by companies making products, but by consumers demanding products. Nigerians coming out of poverty want dirty two stroke mopeds. Vietnamese pho vendors want propane to power their food carts. Latvian software developers want to display their wealth by driving low end luxury cars. Argentinian housewives want to eat steak for every meal. And remote villiagers in Pakistan want to keep enjoying the power they now have in their homes for only the last few years that comes from the coal plant 100km away. And if we want to snap our fingers and decarbonize the world, then at least some of these people are going to face disruptions to some of these goods.
That doesn’t mean that a decarbonized world has to be worse for everyone. But it means that maybe Latvian software developers need to develop a taste for expensive watches, and maybe Argentinian housewives will need to learn to grill jackfruit, and maybe an NGO needs to pay for rural Pakistanis to have solar panels on their roofs. But the actual number of companies that are the endpoints of pollution based on whatever statistical analysis is fairly irrelivant. Whether it is 7 companies or 700 million, we need to stop the demand for carbon intensive goods that is driving the supply - and that means changing peoples preferences or creating alternatives for those preferences to be met which do not depend on carbon emmissions.