Climate, technology and chaos Blog

Are customers of fossil fuel companies more to blame than fossil fuel companies, themselves, for climate change?

I almost think this is a distracting question.

I guess there is a possible argument, that the poor little fossil fuel companies are just satisfying customer demand and should not be held responsible for anything they do, as they are complete victims and slaves to the market, but I don’t hear that very often. It is, for example, not as apparently common as refusal to acknowledge there is a problem.

However, if we think ecologically at all, then we know that companies and customers are bound together in systems. Without people buying the stuff which the companies promote and try to sell, then the system collapses, or transforms. Without people selling, promoting and profiting from the stuff, then people could not use it.

If customers move into electric cars, or ‘green energy,’ then demand will lower, and ideally fossil fuel companies will move into more profitable areas, or go bust – especially as it gets harder to find profitable fossil fuel sources (as it becomes more dangerous and more polluting, with more energy required to get the fuel).

In this case, customers include large customers, like factories, steel makers, aluminium manufacturers, coal powered electricity generators and so on. So the economic system that supports fossil fuels does not just involve people who put petrol in their cars, but other large corporate entities. Change (should we want it) has to involve them as well.

Unfortunately, we know that, if companies own the government (or significant politicians), are established and seem respectable, they will get massive taxpayer subsidies and bailouts to allow them to continue trading. Or they may get government support for continuing fossil fuel use, such as governments buying supply in the national interest, or subsidising purchasers – this is, after all, how capitalism works in practice, and the more pro ‘free market’ the government, the more free they often seem about transferring taxpayers’ wealth to the big corporate sector to keep the market going.

It should also be reasonably obvious that over 100 years of fossil fuel usage, will have set up systems of habit, regulation, distribution, technology and so on, that favours the use of fossil fuels and the happiness of high level people in fossil fuel companies and stock holders.

If you want to change the system, then you need to look at all components of the system, which includes consumers, companies, government, technologies, energy availability, pollution, ecologies (and undoubtedly other factors) and try to work out the least painful and quickest way of avoiding mass damage, or total system failure.

This is difficult, and often unappealing, because there is:

• huge uncertainty in change
• usually a large cost in change
• powerful people and groups who don’t want to risk loss of that power or profit
• a media which tends to support established corporate power
• the possibility that, if we go first, other people will take advantage of us
• huge cultural and symbolic resonance with fossil fuels, the founders of modernity. Heroic miners and entrepreneurs, lucky breaks, huge riches and so on.
• potential acknowledgement that we, ourselves, are partially responsible for the problem, which can be morally unnerving
• hope that we really don’t have to risk anything, or suffer anything, to get by.

Few people would want change from fossil fuels, if it was not for:

• increasing difficulty finding and extracting fossil fuels (it is possible ‘peak oil’ has already occurred)
• wanting to clean up poisonous pollution and smog
• wanting to lessen environmental damage
• wanting to stop climate change.

If you don’t care about these factors, or are taught not to care about these factors, then moving out of fossil fuels is low priority, and the potential loss seems extreme.

The problem is, in this and many other cases, if we don’t attempt controlled change, then we will have uncontrolled change thrust upon us, as the existing system breaks down.

As I have argued previously, in working with systems, we cannot proceed by dogma. We have to proceed experimentally, and observe what the results of actions are, and change our actions and responses as we go along. This is something people, in the West, seem to find difficult. That is another reason why practicing Dadirri might be useful, as is the joined process of sitting with our fears and griefs so we do not run away from them and the problems they know about.

Allocating blame is not the answer, but helping the system to change could be.

Tags: free markets

This entry was posted on February 2, 2021 at 12:52 am and is filed under Uncategorized. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.