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Not my OC but what I've believed for years: there's no conflict between reducing your own environmental impact and holding corporations responsible. We hold corps responsible for the environment by creating a societal ethos of environmental responsibility that forces corporations to serve the people's needs or go bankrupt or be outlawed. And anyone who feels that kind of ethos will reduce their own environmental impact because it's the right thing to do.
Thoughts?
I'll start out with the most damning response to the "footprint" concept: carbon footprint is almost entirely dictated by your income.
The logic that consumer behaviour puts pressure on corporations is based on the logic of supply & demand based pricing.
The problem is, that's an article of faith and not really supported by the evidence. When you put that theory to the test the evidence shows that pricing follows a model where companies effectively dictate their prices to you. It doesn't follow supply and demand.
This is an interview of two economists on this topic: https://www.iheart.com/podcast/105-it-could-happen-here-30717896/episode/everyone-else-admits-we-were-right-122933018/
They also skewer the whole institution of orthodox economics here. I found it quite cathartic.
But the upshot of this is, in my opinion, the only way to reduce your personal carbon footprint is to make yourself "poor" at least as far as the economy is concerned. That may sound impossible, but I think it dovetails nicely with my own politics of building mutual aid networks, where people create alternative methods of directly meeting one another's needs and help wean one another off our dependence on capital and the state.
That isn't consumer activism as much as it is anti-consumer, and that's kind of incidental to its primary goal to create a political body that undermines the entire machinery of capitalism whilst educating common people on how to run a world for and by themselves.
I think I'd quite like to try out a society that praised things like humility, modesty, selflessness
and vilified things like, gluttony, vanity. envy, pride, greed.
I'm not sure where i'm going to find one of those - it'd probably get attacked by some international agency that claims to have intelligence.
That's why part of the key is autonomous on the ground activity that is not on the surface a direct threat to them - although it should be openly aspiring to become a threat. The more we make up of the ecosystem the owning class depends on for support, the less feasible it becomes for them to attack us, until we eventually grow around their entire root system and choke it out.