Big oil coined ‘carbon footprints’ to blame us for their greed
A lot of comments here seem to be focusing on the fact that individuals use oil products beyond what is necessary for basic life and in fact <i>do</i> have some personal responsibility. This seems to me to be missing the forest for the trees.<p>Sometimes society ends up in a situation where we need things that are not sustainable, like oil or coal. Producing those unsustainable products to meet the demands of society does not make the producers solely responsible for any side effects. What <i>is</i> immoral is trying to artificially delay the transition to more sustainable alternatives or to socialize the costs of doing business.<p>Oil companies have repeatedly run well funded PR campaigns with the explicit goal of discrediting arguments that more sustainable energy technology was necessary despite knowing them to be false. Similarly, they have lobbied hard to ensure that when the impacts of oil to the environment are larger than expected, society picks up the tab. This lets them be more reckless with our communal environmental resources.