For example, more people buying EVs can meaningfully reduce CO2 consumption, but you can easily find millions of people ideologically opposed to that.
Or just look at how reliably people reject any policy that vaguely looks like a carbon tax scheme. "Fix the earth somehow, now, but I'm not paying a cent, because that wasn't my fault!" is everyone's rallying cry.
If you're talking rich democratic countries, largely only in the US (this would generally be a _very_ fringe position in Europe, say, even on the hard right). Where the fossil fuel industry spends a lot of money convincing people to be ideologically opposed to that. That is, it's still a producer-driven problem.
The entire issue of incentives to consume being a reason to blame consumers, is obviated when there are entire industries that have spent significant amounts of money and capital to ensure that voters cannot come to a consensus.
The science on global warming was clear eons ago. The true revolution has been in scientists learning how weak facts are when going up against media machines.
I still don't get how people got to that. In my head a decent first step for a carbon tax would be producing made consumer goods; the end result would be that yes, capitalism 'should' eventually win out and the more ecologically sound solutions would prevail.
Individual choice is actually a small part of this wheel, almost negligible.
The vast majority of polluting is done by industry, and they also do the most not to make things better and actively often try to make things worse.
For instance, consumers want fast and high speed rail and light rail in cities, yet the federal government is still subsidizing hundreds of billions of dollars to car centric projects rather than allowing municipalities and state governments to have control over those funds they come with strings attached that force them to choose car centric options.
Affordable housing is another example. Consumers want reliable cheap homes but every single attempt to unseat obtuse regulations and policies that make home bulldog a nightmare across metropolitan areas all over the Us entrenched home owners fight in as many ways possible to keep new homes from being built. This pushes more people into farther out suburbs that makes an existing issue even worse.
So no, it’s not all consumer choices, not even “pretty much”.
The false dichotomy that it’s simply choice is not a good faith argument.
The other flip of the coin is this: people can consume in ecologically smart and sustainable ways, and often given the choice they do but lack of choice exists across most sectors that don’t allow them to or are knowingly priced higher than the alternative options due to poor regulation or lack of proper subsidy on the scale of the dirty alternative.
And we subsidize a lot when it comes to oil, natural gas and coal, let alone other industrial polluting industries.
1. There's no option
2. Oil companies lied to them about safety
