this post was submitted on 10 Jul 2023
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When I was in elementary school, the cafeteria switched to disposable plastic trays because the paper ones hurt trees. Stupid, I know... but are today's initiatives any better?

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[–] [email protected] 9 points 1 year ago (3 children)

A corporate problem and a societal problem are two sides of the same coin. Corporations don't make money in isolation, they make money because they sell things that (directly or ultimately) are bought by consumers.

You could choose to imagine a scenario where the CEOs of Shell, BP, ExxonMobil, etc just voluntarily decide to stop extracting oil overnight, and think that would be more impactful than billions of individual consumers slashing their demand for carbon-intensive products and fuels. But if the consumers don't change their behaviour and continue to demand this stuff, other companies would just step in to fill the gap, takeover the old oil fields, etc.

The sustainable way to change corporate behaviour is through changing their end-consumers' behaviour - i.e. if end-consumers stop directly buying carbon-intensive products and stop buying from carbon-intensive companies.

[–] [email protected] 33 points 1 year ago (1 children)

Corps frame it as an individualist problem because they don't want regulation, which is really the only viable way to attack the problem (and regulations needs to be backed by treaties with teeth since it is a global problem).

You can't expect every consumer to research every product and service they buy to make sure these products were made with an acceptable footprint. And if low-footprint products/services are more expensive or somehow not quite as good, there will be a financial incentive to use higher footprint products (if individuals acted "rationally," this is what they would do).

[–] [email protected] 12 points 1 year ago

I think there is two important points that you haven't considered:

  • Information asymmetry: in economics, this is the situation where one party has more/better information than the other. Of course a big corporation will have more information about a product I'm using that I would on every product I use, especially given that they can hire as many specialists as they want. Because of this, consumers should not be expected to take care of all societal change through their choices

  • You seem to imply that these companies only exist to satisfy a customer need. While this is partially true, this completely omits the fact that since 15 years, every company has a marketing department, whose sole purpose is to suscit this need in the consumer mind. Company are not just need-fulfilling machines, but also self feeding systems. You can't talk about the fact that renewing your phone emits a lot of carbon without talking about the fact that every phone company spends millions at making you want to renew it

[–] [email protected] 5 points 1 year ago* (last edited 1 year ago)

The MOST sustainable way to change corporate behavior is to make it prohibitively expensive for them to engage in behavior that is bad for the environment by levying major financial penalties and taxes on the offending corporations.