memes

I agree so very much.
People around me fly on holidays by plane like two, three times a year, still eat meat, shower twice a day and buy shit they don't need from Amazon, because they can. This needs to stop! Will it save us? Of course not, but who else is going to stop the global suicide machine? Trump? The fossil destroyers? Do you want to protest another 70 years or go blow up a pipeline?
We are billions, we have the power of "No, thanks, I don't want that" every fucking day but the endless consumption of stuff is too tempting. Instead, we sit at home, comfortably warm, well fed and lonely, in front of our seethrough plexiglas RGB LED computers and point fingers at corporations that are exactly as greedy, selfish and irresponsible as every single one of us.
NO THANKS! This could be the easiest global movement, no violence, no riots, yet corporations would be powerless. But you'd need to change, and you don't want that.

Edit: If you downvote, please tell me where I'm wrong and what's your counter-proposal in this actual situation right now.

It's a multifaceted issue, but don't kid yourself

http://amp.theguardian.com/sustainable-business/2017/jul/10/100-fossil-fuel-companies-investors-responsible-71-global-emissions-cdp-study-climate-change.

China weighs in at 14.5% for coal. Another 1-point-some-odd for their Petro Chem. The issue is that there are a lot of companies that make up the remainder.

Demand definitely plays a role in all of this, but I don't think pushing green initiatives is a bad thing from the consumers and one of the only ways we can encourage these companies to do their part

I hate the narrative too. Just people avoiding responsibility and complaining instead of doing what they can and should.

Obviously our individual actions matter.

Humans are so naturally stupid that they almost make AI seem intelligent.

Have you somehow missed just how car-centric just about everything is? I mean, most public space out there is taken by roads and public transport is generally insufficient.

Granted, there are much better countries in this than others.

Ditto on other things imposed on people such as planed obsolence: Can you still buy a fridge that will last you a lifetime? Does your 15 year old original iPhone still work well? How many of the electronics out there are not repairable?

Then there's all the pressure to make people consume, using techniques from Psychology (you can go read all about how the nephew of Freud introduced into Marketing techniques from Psychology back in the 50s). Absolutelly, people should be stronger and wiser than that, but most are not and just claiming that "it's people's fault" when others take adavantage of natural human weaknesses is just victim blaming.

Absolutelly, Consumerism is a big part of the problem and it's a lot down to individuals to do less of it, but lets not deceive ourselves that the environment we're all in not only promotes it massivelly and relentlessly, but plenty of decisions which were taken for us by others mean individuals often don't even have a choice not to buy new junk or ride a personal-polution-device, and in Capitalism those decisions were taken mainly by large Companies directly or by the politicians they bought.

Those 100 companies have made it so it's incredibly difficult not to buy from them.

Groceries? There's like 10 companies that own all of the food supply. Good luck figuring out which one's have child labor, and a horrendous environmental impact. They've very purposely masked that image.

Oh wow, everything is recyclable! No, those companies just slapped that logo on all of their products so we can ignorantly wish-cycle their garbage. Most of it ends up in the landfill.

Don't want a car? Our cities are very deliberately designed to require cars. There is a very strong private agenda against good public transportation.

Then there's the pollution. These companies pollute so much more than we know. Whether that's dumping forever chemicals into our water, or taking private jets everywhere. It's not like the label on your T-shirt tells you that.

Finally find a good company? They'll buy it up, lobby against it, or coerce them out of business. Just look how many companies Luxottica has destroyed.

There's layer after layer of obfuscation to hide what these companies are doing. It's not just a matter of picking Product A over Product B. We rarely have much choice, or the information to make better choices.

I'll GLADLY buy the alternative that doesn't do those things. When it exists. One day.

You could buy from other company. But if you are buying the same product the pollution fingerprint would be similar on most cases.

You could just not buy the products. But if you buy things is to improve your quality of life.

So the best course of action is not to make people have less quality of life. Instead push for less people on the planet so they can afford more pollution per person.

That's the best part! You can't!

Thanks to the consolidation and vertical integration of the largest multinationals, as long as you choose to live — no matter how careful and conscious your purchases — a significant proportion of it will still funnel to most of these corporations.