“Carbon footprint” is widely recognized to be “BP talk” to blame you the individual for your burger while Musk has four jetplanes.
These days, “climate justice” is the new “carbon footprint”. Both are technically true (and vital) but designed to tangle us up while they are drilling like crazy.
In the ecological movement we had been talking about “footprint” throughout the 90s and early 00s. It is a true and real thing (although mostly applied on the organizational, systematic level rather than individuals).; BP latched on to an existing thing with their insiduous campaign.
In 2005, fossil fuel company BP hired the large advertising campaign Ogilvy to popularize the idea of a carbon footprint for individuals.
Then as demand was drying up, out came the populists with “no it’s not your fault, it’s the companies, and you can continue burning, we’re not gonna take your car and cheeseburgers away”.
What we really need to do yesterday is stop oil, stop fossil fuels and plastic. Regulate it. Ration it. Leave it in the ground. Ban fossil fuel capitalists from lobbyism. They’ve burnt their trust along with the planet. Amend to reverse Citizens United.
Climate justice (just like carbon footprint) is never gonna be irrelevant or false. Capitalism literally is the problem since exploitation of market capitalism’s externalities bug is the climate crisis.
But the fact that climate change has become a “left vs right” isuse in a way that hairspray and refrigerators and Y2K never was is something that pleases the oil barons and frackerjacks to no end. Workers vs owners has been a point of contention for tens of thousands of years. There’s bible quotes OT and NT about just compensation for hard work and control over means of production. Making untangling that particular ball of yarn a prereq for climate action is insane.
Stop capitalism, replace it, or just patch it, I’m on board for either but stop fossils immediately. As in now. There was a time for soft and gradual brakes and y’all missed it. Now it’s time for a hard slam or the whole thing careers over the edge.
And blame where blame is due. It’s not we haters of markets (whether ancom or tankies) who did this. It was fossil fuel lobbyists taking advantage over a populist and corrupt oligarch regime. I’m not blaming anti-capitalists for how capitalists wrecked the world and then took advantage of our rage against the machine to fuel the machine.
Just saying fix it now. Quibbling costs lives.