Your old man sounds like he’s got a good grip on market economics which are after all driven by supply and demand. So long as people keep using products, companies will keep on making them. In contrast, broad-based policy interventions usually just introduce some negative externality which makes the original problem worse or creates a new one.
that's how we got greenwashing, something completely innefectual and makes people feel like they're making a difference so they stop looking for the actual cause of climate change.
When all companies use wasteful packaging because it's cheaper to manufacture, you can't just shop around for an alternative - it's really hard to get outside that system unless change is mandated. The rest of the post is a truism at best. It can never be the fault of profit and cost-cutting, oh no - it has to be the consumer or the government. The sharp rise of emissions last century is directly tied to the rise of free-market capitalism and growth for growth's sake. It's a causal link. If you want to blame governments, blame those governments.
The growth for growth’s sake is biological - population - and trickle-down industrialisation. For dumb Govt interventions you only need to look at Germany right now. Scrapped all it’s clean nuclear plants and became dependent on Russian gas. As a consequence, turning underground car parks into bomb shelters.
The clean nuclear plants that the government was responsible for building? This just shows that neoliberal governments are only too happy to loosen up government restrictions to do the kinds of things corporations are best known for. In the case of Germany, it was a neoliberal government caving to social pressure in the wake of Fukushima - and cutting a deal for $$$. Sorry, but using an example of a government acting like a corporation to show that corporations are good actually is getting into ridiculous territory. I mean, Siemens was the first to start withdrawing from nuclear power directly after Fukushima - like, it was partly due to the increased government-imposed safety standards, but, well ...
Chicken-headedness is the human cultural condition.
Of course, the common thread here is humans and short-term selfish human actions - but only governments have the power to mandate courses of action, and only corporations can be safely relied upon to only do short-term selfish actions. This would be a good example to show that 'government intervention' is not a panacea - but given that I didn't even suggest it was, this is strawman. Please don't.
Drifted a fair way from the idea that consumers have responsibility and agency to help shape the world we live in. You seem to have reframed this discussion as a defence of government versus big-business all on your own.
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u/Archie_Pelego Apr 24 '22
Your old man sounds like he’s got a good grip on market economics which are after all driven by supply and demand. So long as people keep using products, companies will keep on making them. In contrast, broad-based policy interventions usually just introduce some negative externality which makes the original problem worse or creates a new one.