Big oil coined ‘carbon footprints’ to blame us for their greed

I think this may be Is vs. Ought.

Realistically and politically, people will not bear any significant sacrifice to solve CO2 emissions. They just won't. They won't do it.

You can say that they ought to as much as you please. You can say that they need to. But they still won't. You aren't going to scold them into being different. You aren't going to lecture them into being different. And you aren't going to use politics to force them to be different, because they vote, and all the politicians know they vote.

For us to get anywhere on CO2, the non-CO2 path has to be better and/or less expensive. That's it. In the real world, with the humans that we have, anything else isn't going to get any traction.

> Like tobacco companies, oil companies have actively lied and lobbied to maintain demand and obstruct coordinated effort of exactly the kind you describe as necessary. They are not passive actors simply responding to demand as they find it.

These really aren't very similar. Big Tobacco's lies were the only thing propping up the tobacco industry. As soon as the truth became clear, their industry was absolutely crushed. The truth about climate change has been clear for decades, but unlike the situation with tobacco, the demand for Oil & Gas keeps on growing[0]. This is because, unlike tobacco, Oil & Gas is absolutely indispensable--especially for developing countries.

Lying about climate change was a terrible thing, and it cost us precious time. But we still need them to keep the lights on, and pretending that the act of producing Oil & Gas today--when it is literally a hard requirement to keep the lights on around the world-- is somehow pernicious, is just silliness. The world is stressful enough without all the outrage theatre.

[0] https://ourworldindata.org/fossil-fuels

or at least require the cost of putting carbon back into the ground to be factor price.

The problem is when you slow gdp it's the most marginalized that are hit the hardest.

So, the CEO only makes 10M instead of 50M(or whatever number) but what about the poor farmer that was making just enough to run his tractor to get by and feed his family.

> there exists a collective responsibility to make individual adaptations to combat climate change.

Individual adaptations do not matter unless they are undertaken collectively. My personal lifestyle changes don’t impact the state of CO2 emissions in any significant way. Leading by example AND talking about it has more impact, but still negligible unless/until enough people do it.

Changing incentives, by making production account for the climate change externality, will shift more people into changing their lifestyle based on price alone. It’s the same reasoning behind targeting drug dealers and cartels more heavily than end-users.

These disinformation campaigns are a major obstacle to introducing the kind of reforms required to decarbonize our economy. Overcoming these obstacles largely requires shining a light on their bad behavior so the oil companies (and other industry groups) lose credibility and thus undermine their disinformation campaigns.

Perhaps to your point, there's no way out of this mess without carbon pricing, and even Democrats (who profess to believe that climate change is an existential threat) won't rally behind it even though it would free up massive amounts of money to fund their redistributive programs--choosing instead to spend large amounts of money on symbolic efforts such as a "citizens climate corps". I suspect this speaks in large part to the extent to which corporations have politicians in their pockets (certainly Joe Manchin is in the pocket of the coal industry and doesn't even pretend otherwise). Note that this isn't to say Republicans are better--by and large Republicans haven't even signed onto the idea that climate change poses an existential threat.

EDIT: everyone should write their congresspeople and urge them to support carbon pricing initiatives. Here's a dead-simple link that takes your email and your address, identifies your representatives, and gives you a form pre-populated with a canned message that will be emailed when you click "submit": https://citizensclimatelobby.org/house/