Comment by lostlogin
2 hours ago
> While shareholders obviously hold a greater degree of control over a company's emissions than a random consumer, assigning 100% of the blame for oil company emissions to the owners and 0% to people buying oil seems insane.
But what’s the appropriate allocation? I don’t think it’s zero. It shouldn’t be a larger percentage than their shareholding.
There are other examples. Eg someone who manufactures or sells dangerous items. Drugs, alcohol, guns.
They have some degree of liability in many jurisdictions. They aren't entirely responsible for what their products do. But are they zero percent responsible?
There is no right answer re blaming the customer or owner. This is push vs pull.
one question we could ask is, how much carbon emissions would these allocations represent if there were no consumers?
that answer might be a more accurate number than the percentage of their shareholding.
Is this an argument about free markets and regulation?
Eg should the responsibility be on tobacco smokers to look after themselves, or governments to regulate/restrict/ban.
It would be a bit of a dishonest question in my opinion. Take the oil and car industry in the US for example. They've spent the past 70 years or so dismantling alternative transport infrastructure (among other things...). So how are we now going to assign the blame to the guy driving his car to work, instead of taking the bus that takes 4x as long, requires 3 transfers, and has people openly taking drugs on it? In the ideal world, sure, there would be a fair and even playing field of alternatives and the blame would 100% lie with the consumers who choose from this totally even field of possibilities. But we don't live in that ideal world.
What if the guy in the car voted for pro-oil politicians whose campaign explicitly included expanding fossil fuel consumption and cutting budgets to trains and other public transit?
Because ultimately the way we organize society is we have a democracy and we vote on representatives to make the laws. Companies actually don't get to directly cut public transit, they have to convince voters to do that.
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