First, in the chain of supply and consumption, the consumer is the only link which cannot be bypassed. If the individual consumer stops consuming, nothing can be done about it, except to try and persuade someone else to increase their consumption to compensate. At present, everyone else is already being persuaded pretty much as hard as possible anyway, so that won't have much effect, even if the message to stop consuming does not also spread. This situation does not, however, apply to other links in the supply chain. Nor does it apply to governments. Get rid of one destructive widget manufacturer, and there are usually a million more manufacturers (or potential manufacturers) waiting in the wings to take his place. In other words, consumption is the limiting factor, not supply. Similarly, if the entire government died of some unfortunate disease overnight but there was no change in the popular ideology, an almost identical government would be installed immediately after the election.
Second, politicians, advertisers and businessmen are not stupid. They know what I was too naive to realize until the revelations of the quota made it inescapable. They understand the depth of hypocrisy lying behind all the environmentalist's accusations. They know that virtually no one, not even the environmentalists themselves, is actually willing to live sustainable. No one really wants the world saved, not if it will significantly restrict their gluttony. All anyone really wants is someone else to blame. So the producers and politicians serve us doubly. While fine-tuning the machinery of destruction for us to fuel and drive, they receive the wrath which we aim at them. Perhaps we have actually come to believe in our own condemnation of our suppliers.
Perhaps these career scapegoats even encourage us, by adjusting their rhetoric so as to continue to attract our anger. After all, they wouldn't want us to face reality, would they? Whatever the case, having established our supply of excuses, we continue to buy whatever we like for ourselves, rewarding the politicians with votes for a job well done, and blessing businessmen with an uninhibited market. Even the environmental pressure groups now find a comfortable nest in this collective rottenness. They soon learned that subs and fame came only from telling the sort of truth that people wanted to hear. We were thus instructed to direct our hatred at governments and multinationals. With our lifestyles quantitatively exceeding sustainable levels many times over, the most that mainstream environmental groups thought we should have to cope with was the suggestion that we put our bottles in a different shaped bin, or pump up our car tires properly. Pleased with their words, we gave them some money. Pleased with our money, they gave us newsletters full of invective about big business, and colored stickers to stick on our unsustainable cars.
It is logical enough, I suppose, that our environmentally corrupt society should have an even more corrupt environmental movement to protect it. Perhaps everyone else has known this for years, but it is new to me, and something of a shock.
Global Warming:
No-one Ever is to Blame
