Comment by photonthug

> That's definitely not true. Let's take Americans, for example, driving their cars to work.

Even an example like this that is carefully chosen to make consumers feel/act more responsible falls short. You want people to change their lives/careers to not drive? Ok, but most people already want to work from home, so even the personal “choice” about whether to drive a car is basically stuck like other issues pending government / corporate action, in this case to either improve transit or to divest from expensive commercial real estate. This is really obvious isn’t it?

Grabbing back our feeling of agency should not come at the expense of blaming the public under the ridiculous pretense of “educating” them, because after years of that it just obscures the issues and amounts to misinformation. Fwiw I’m more inclined to agree with admonishing consumers to “use gasoline responsibly!” than say, water usage arguments where cutting my shower in half is supposed to somehow fix decades of irresponsible farming, etc. But after a while, people mistrust the frame itself where consumers are blamed, and so we also need to think carefully about the way we conduct these arguments.