While this is true, and I agree, this insight has been obvious for at least the last 40 years. Seeing the change is unfortunately very different than bringing the change. I am afraid most people need the emergency at their own doorstep before they are truly willing to act and make sacrifices to their way of living.
Have you stopped buying the myriad "cleaning" products which pollute your home and create pollution in the process of being produced?
Have you stopped buying disposable clothing and plastic trinkets?
If you are still buying these things, you are complicit in this ecocide. And now you know it, too.
Once you stop yourself, you can tell others, too.
Without making changes in your own actions, there's little you can ask of anyone else.
This is a change that will come one individual convincing another individual, one at a time, to stop contributing to the problem.
No one else will do it for us: politicians don't give a fuck, corporations don't give a fuck, regulators don't give a fuck, military doesn't give a fuck, even "scientists" are mostly in the same camp of not giving a fuck, for the most part.
We are the only ones who give a fuck, because it's our close relatives, and soon, us, who are being exterminated.
And we are feeding and building our own extermination machine.
If they stopped single-use plastics, that would be a world first. Microbeads were recently banned; this is obviously orders of magnitude more effective than boycotting microbead-containing hygiene products would ever have been.
By all means, reduce your personal consumption of harmful products. Don't fool yourself into thinking it's a substitute for activism and political action.
We are facing a tragedy of the commons, and individual action does not solve that. This holds true for overfishing, pollution, greenhouse gas emissions, you name it. The change we need is pigovian taxes, which factor negative externalities into the price of the activity causing it, instead of letting them be amortised by society. Consumer-shaming is not how we solve a tragedy of the commons.
If half the world stops burning fossil fuels tomorrow, the other half will enjoy cheaper oil and double their emissions the next day. Tax pollutants.
Exactly! We need to stop acting like people will wake-up one day and change all of their habits. You want to change behaviors? Make it so expensive to engage in those behaviors that they're no longer economically viable.
