I don't think the person you're replying to is saying anything else, but consumers could, if they decided in mass, do literally everything the government can do around pricing in externalities. Pricing in externalities isn't just forcing companies to pay for the price of their externalities, it's also forcing consumers. And honestly consumers do need forced. We aren't solving this through personal responsibility. But it's also ridiculous to say something like just 100 companies responsible for 71% of global emissions when those companies are just fossil fuel extractors. I'm responsible for burning gas, not the company that just happened to pull it out of the ground.

>consumers could, if they decided in mass, do literally everything the government can do

this is kind of an aside, but i keep noticing this weird dissonance that keeps cropping up in conversations about regulation where people seem to assume:

consumers organizing to exercise power normally allocated to a government is somehow preferable to the existing government exercising power according to civil mandate

in a representative democracy, the latter is presumably the ideal. in the former situation, any context, you're talking about dual power, which is not politically stable, to put it mildly.

when people say "it's not my personal responsibility" to make all the personal choices necessary to reduce carbon output, they are stating an expectation that a responsible society would systematically account for these externalities and other obligations.

there is a bit of reason to this already discussed. markets by definition are not able to account for externalities, it's not possible for individuals to gather enough information to make these decisions reliably, etc. this political choice is an organized consumer choice, asking the socially approved bodies that have this information and power, to surface the results in a way that consumers can understand and react to.

when this political/consumer choice is undone or blocked, or dismissed as irresponsible in preference to individual consumer behavior, it encourages individuals to organize dual power and take direct action.

you can see this organizing developing through pipeline resistance and train sabotage and the like. sure, people could theoretically just buy gas from the least evil gas station or whatever, but once you've got enough people thinking about consumer choice to be effective, you've got enough people to literally just go and take apart the thing you don't like.

so this dismissal of regulation is necessarily combined with repression against people advocating for organized action.

i'm not sure everyone talking about this understands it or will like where it leads.

Yeah I think these are very good points. I think maybe what I'd like to have more clarity about is that fixing global warming does look like consumers making different choices. They may be forced to make different choices by the government in some way (carbon taxes, bans, incentives, ect), but it isn't like there are companies that can decide to do better, stop polluting and just stop it all. Part of fixing these issues will mean less European vacations as jet fuel gets more expensive. Part of fixing this might involve driving less or taking public transit more. There aren't tradeoff free solutions to these problems that are being withheld and while tech might fix some of this, developing that tech will come at the expensive of developing some other tech and that choice will impact consumers.

And just because you aim a policy on paper at big companies doesn't actually mean it doesn't impact consumers. You can say there are just 100 companies responsible for most global warming, but if you went and made them stop everyone would starve, and if you tax them everyone will find themselves not able to buy as much as they otherwise would. You can of course also accompany any of these policies with a redistribution of wealth, either by printing money, or by some tax scheme, but you are reducing the pie.

Obviously though we should still do this, the long term impacts of not doing it will be worse and also impact consumers

Not only that, but even then the 100 companies thing is complete BS. That's a measure of consolidation of energy companies, nothing more. If they all merged into a single gigantic hyper-corporation, it wouldn't change emissions. If they split into a million companies, all with 1/10000 the market share of the 100, again, the same.

The statistic is completely meaningless in the context of emissions. The only relevant statistics are total emissions. The atmosphere doesn't count a carbon atom differently by the market cap of the company that dig it up. It doesn't even count them differently if a person emits a tonne or 1000 people emit 1kg each.

The vast majority of people do not have the financial power to make changes like this.

How can you be responsible for the burning of the gas when there is no meaningful alternative? I don't ask to have my food shipped across country. I don't ask my electric company to burn oil. All I want is food. All I want is heat in my house. But the only places to get those things from are burning carbon fuels.

There are meaningful alternatives. You can choose to pay more and get an electric car and pay for net 0 electricity. For a bit more you could shop from a local farm. If enough people did that it would incentive those options to get better, but they are all choices I could make today

edit: and in fact if we want to solve these issue the sort of actions we will need to take. There isn't anyone who could fix these problems easily without sacrifices and is choosing not to

Ah, yes, I will do this with all the free money I have laying around.

I guess my point is not to shame people and maybe responsibility gets a bit convoluted at some point, but the reason fixing global warming is so hard is that it does require a sacrifice of living standards. We can probably develop tech to make it less painful and ideally not even painful at all but that will come at the price of some other tech we could be having worked on. People prefer to frame this as a few bad actors who just need forced to do the right thing because they would rather not admit that they themselves are making the economic choices leading to global warming and I do really think most people on here could be sacrificing to lower their emissions

You can't make sacrifices on your living standards when you're already poor and don't have any room to sacrifice. You can't make an informed decision on sacrifices to your living standards when working all the time and don't have any time to go pierce through the veil of megaconglomerate multi source supply chains. You can't make meaningful sacrifices when you live in a community that is too small to be served by more than a virtual monopoly of suppliers.

Why stop at buying your own electricity plant? Make your own solar panels to make absolutely sure no chemicals are getting leached into the local water supply. Hell, mine your own cobalt or lithium while you're at it. How else are we going to make such a Great Leap Forward?

I think you're just describing why fixing global warming is hard. Literally the only way to fix global warming is making serious changes that will change how people live their lives. Obviously we won't want to do it all at once, but there aren't evil companies who can make some simple changes without impacting us.

Worth noting come of those tradeoffs may need to be accepting environmental pollution of the traditional kind. We also can absolutely redistribute wealth. Literally all standards, car safety, apartment safety, job safety, impact the poorest most, and we can and should solve that with redistributive policies, but I doubt most on hackernews are in the receiving redistributions slice of society

I'll volunteer the Facebook devs, there are plenty of talented people working on roles that I think most of us would be happy to do with out.