> People are still booking international vacations and buying brand new full size SUVs to do groceries.
And an awful lot of people are still acting as though "end users" can materially affect the situation with their personal choices, and implying that they are bad people for making them. I'm sure the American oligarchy and the leaders of China appreciate your efforts.
I don't know how you got the idea that I was implying people are "bad" for their lifestyle choices. I was talking about how far away we are from widespread acceptance and realistic acknowledgement of the problem.
When I see people acting like nothing is wrong, doing things that contribute to the problem, I do think that indicates a lack of acceptance and realization. Now I may be wrong. It could be possible that people are fully aware of the problem and are YOLO'ing their way through it. Or they share your opinion that nothing they do can materially affect the situation anyway, so they just go full throttle on carbon emission. But I suspect that for most people, that's not the case. I think that most people are unaware of the severity of the situation, and that if they were aware, they probably wouldn't be doing those things. Again, I could be completely wrong about what people know and how they would choose to behave. But at no point was I implying that there are good people and bad people and that personal carbon footprint is a decent way to measure that.
People are generally aware that their actions contribute to climate change, unless they choose to deny it for ideological reasons. They are just unwilling to make lifestyle sacrifices because of it. Most people value their personal comfort and the comfort of their family above the (statistical) lives of strangers.
You see exactly the same phenomenon every time a professional chooses to live in comfort instead of donating most of their income to charity. That's how people work, that's what they value, and that's why collective action is the only way of dealing with large-scale problems.
Yes, I'm one of those people and I'm not sorry. I think big corporations are evil, but I also think they exist because ordinary people buy their products, usually out of convenience.
There would be not much use for so much fossil burning if we didn't use huge cars to transport us for half a mile instead of walking, or building houses in the freakind desert, or watching TV, or illumiating whole towns and changing night time into daylight, or constantly buying new clothes when we could still wear the old ones, or stuffing ourselves with food until we explode, etc.
So yes, no one personal choice will "materially affect" the situation. But the effort has to start somewhere. Blaming others, "oligarchs" or Chinese leaders doesn't help. It's just a cheap excuse.
Suggesting that I give up -- admit it -- a LOT of personal freedom and convenience, when Chinese companies spew emissions equal to HUNDREDS OF MILLIONS OF PEOPLE -- and have no real incentive to change -- is like trying to empty the ocean with an eyedropper, while someone else is emptying buckets into it. Your "cheap excuse" is precisely the kind of "bad person" inference that I was alluding to. People like you seem to value altruism at MANY orders of magnitude than the people you are disparaging. And, hey, that's great, and all, but we just think you're bad at math.
And an awful lot of people are still acting as though "end users" can materially affect the situation with their personal choices, and implying that they are bad people for making them. I'm sure the American oligarchy and the leaders of China appreciate your efforts.