You do not think the general public would be pissed off if they could no longer expect to live in detached single family homes on quarter acre lots and drive large personal vehicles?
It is enormously politically unpopular to let gas prices go up, and I do not see how one can blame large companies for that.
This is a strawman and a false dichotomy often pushed by the industry:
1) choose between modern lifestyle and its ecosocial impact or go back to 1900. Other options cannot be discussed
2) make a mess (e.g. microplastics) and then blame/fine consumers for despite being overwhelmingly responsible for the decisions around industrial processes
e.g. https://www.theguardian.com/sustainable-business/2017/jul/10...
[as a side note, most people I know live in apartments, by choice. A lot of them have no car.]
I do not know any people with kids that would choose to live in apartments, or without cars. I would be surprised if there is anything more than a tiny minority (in the US) with kids that does not have a goal of living in a spacious home with backyards and garages in a nice school district.
These expectations are at odds with reducing carbon emissions. Companies being responsible for emissions is just a fiction of accounting. At the end of the day, I believe that a large portion of voters in USA would retaliate against a group of politicians that would make their lives more expensive under the guise of helping future generations and require them to give up large amounts of their quality of life.
However, it is also true that large companies get to disproportionately dump whatever feeble attempts at reducing consumption that do get enacted into consumers, such as water restrictions that affect individuals, but exempt the largest water consumers.
I guess my overall point is we need sufficient people to lower their quality of life expectations, and then that will propel the political will to make the necessary changes to force reductions in consumption.
Uh, you think Bob leaving the lights on in his house compares to operating a factory in terms of carbon emissions? I haven't seen the data and you aren't presenting any but my default assumption would definitely be that industry manufacturing and farming things at huge scale and pumping exhaust into the air by the ton is a way bigger factor than whether Bob drives a hybrid.
Human societies have been signing agreement and treaties to access shared resources like bodies of water and grazing land for thousands of years.
There are millions of international laws around trade, transportation, safety, aeronautics down to the smallest details.
Regulating emissions is so unpopular because it goes against financial interests of large companies.