It was initially used by BP to shift blame to consumers instead of oil companies.
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It’s spread to being used by more entities than just BP, but the blame-shifting purpose remains the same.
Climate change can only be solved by regulating fossil fuel production at its source (e.g. taxing it enough to fully compensate for its negative externalities), not by trying to guilt-trip individuals.
Yup.
The same trick is played with recycling. Blame the end consumer for a supply chain completely out of their control.
The biggest polluters are corporations and we stop their pollution by regulation. These mega corps would have you believe that it’s really your fault PFAS are everywhere because you shouldn’t have bought those Teflon coated products. Nevermind the fact that Teflon is everywhere a nonstick surface is needed.
Yep. The personal responsibility gambit (or should I say fallacy?).
It was such a clever idea, starting with Coca Cola’s “Litterbug” campaign (where they campaigned against bottle deposits under the guise of wanting “personal responsibility” over “regulations.”)
It’s “up to the consumer” to make the right choices. It just so happens that the meat from decently treated animals is five times more expensive and that you have to drive 100 miles to buy it. Or that being environmentally conscious has been made into a tiring exercise in futility where you constantly have to inconvenience yourself.
As an added bonus, individuals trying to convince other individuals to inconvenience themselves in the same way can be painted as obnoxious, holier-than-thou and insufferable. A real double win for unscrupulous big business.
The fact that teflon is still everywhere should be proof enough that regulations are worthless in the face of capitalism (a feature of course, not a bug)
Not really, PFAS have been almost completely unregulated. It is just in the last 2 years that we are starting to see PFAS regulations globally. Up until that point, we allowed companies to literally just dump them down the rain or in a lake.
If regulations were so worthless, you should be asking yourself why every single industry fights new ones. Why the supreme court in the US has taken a position to kill Chevron Deference which weakens federal agencies ability to regulate.
The failure isn’t regulations, the failure is a government system that severely neuters the ability of a government to regulate. The failure is a bunch of science denying corporate captured politicians that don’t care how they destroy the planet.
You know that scene in the Jurassic Park movie? Where there’s this big dinosaur print, big enough to step into?
Imagine a footprint so big that you can stand in it without knowing it’s a footprint, and you leave your own teeny tiny adorable little footprints inside it.
BP’s is still bigger than that
