A fixation on system change alone opens the door to a kind of cynical self-absolution that divorces personal commitment from political belief. This is its own kind of false consciousness, one that threatens to create a cheapened climate politics incommensurate with this urgent moment.
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Because here’s the thing: When you choose to eat less meat or take the bus instead of driving or have fewer children, you are making a statement that your actions matter, that it’s not too late to avert climate catastrophe, that you have power. To take a measure of personal responsibility for climate change doesn’t have to distract from your political activism—if anything, it amplifies it.
This is what I’m trying to get across to you here. You’ve posted the same thing notion multiple times in this thread. The consumer share isn’t the smallest part, it’s most of it. All the oil we extract serves to make products, transport products, sell products to the consumer - you. It’s not being being burnt for fun.
When you engage in consumption, any amount of it, you’re pulling a string connected to a million other strings that mostly end up in an oil well one way or another. The luxury you speak of is in that consumption, not the lack of it.
And if you think otherwise, compare your lifestyle, your lifelong level of comfort to that of someone who spent their whole life living in a hut in Mali, whose lifelong emissions equal a few months worth of yours. Now try to tell that person that you’re not responsible for the gas you burn, it’s the fault of those that provided you with the option to do it. It’s insulting.