Profit from whom? All these industries ultimately sell the resulting end products to people.
This idea that Exxon Mobile is solely to blame for gasoline emissions or that a factory owner is the only one responsible for the emissions from their factory, rather than the person who purchases and uses those products is quite frankly absurd.
> This idea that Exxon Mobile is solely to blame for gasoline emissions or that a factory owner is the only one responsible for the emissions from their factory, rather than the person who purchases and uses those products is quite frankly absurd.
No it's not. The cost of pumping CO2 into the air should be factored into the cost of running a polluting factory. If it's not factored in, there's basically zero chance that a "clean" alternative factory will be economically competitive today. Asking everyone in the world to voluntarily spend more on goods that they're not even sure are manufactured in a cleaner way (see "greenwashing") seems like a dead end to me.
It doesn’t take a psychic to know that filling up your car with gasoline is going to cause a bunch of emissions. Or that the manufacture of a bicycle pollutes way less than a large SUV.
For some reason lots of people have this idea that the path to solving climate change is for consumers to make no changes to their wasteful consumption, but somehow fix it on the backend so everything is net-zero. In reality, the only workable path must include systematic changes that result in people consuming less (along with lowering industrial emissions for the consumption that remains)
As long as there are other options, then I agree with seoaeu that the people who choose to buy polluting products and services do share the responsibility for climate change and other avoidable environmental destruction.
I also agree with you we should factor in CO2 production as a cost, to take advantage of the economic system (which actually works pretty well within it's domain after all, eh?)
It's not a company's fault that the government is unwilling to neutralize externalities. Deciding to do so when everyone else doesn't just means you will fail as consumers switch to cheaper, higher pollution alternatives.
> An example of this would be when a wild cod is caught off the coast of Alaska and, due to economic factors, is shipped to another country to be fabricated into fillets and packaged. If this process of turning a whole fish into packaged fillets occurs in China, the cod fillets are declared “Wild Caught Product of China” upon import into the United States.
Yes, the fishing industry is to blame for shipping caught fish from USA to china and back, and the whole thing is very absurd.
There's a difference between being manufactured in china, and being manufactured in usa, sent to china, where they pack them in a box, and sent back to USA
This idea that Exxon Mobile is solely to blame for gasoline emissions or that a factory owner is the only one responsible for the emissions from their factory, rather than the person who purchases and uses those products is quite frankly absurd.