You can spend your entire life fretting over how each and every one of the products you use was produced. You can dig through hard to find information (if there is even such public information at all!) and devote literal hours per day on that quest. You will have made an impact which is a millionth of what an (unelectable, unaccountable) CEO can do with a decision of his.
This is not sustainable, it's not democratic, frankly it has to change.
PS: Not to mention you can only even have the luxury of doing this if you're at least relatively well off. If you're poor you just buy cheapest of everything, no questions asked.
But there's stuff that doesn't fall in that category. Flying for example. In Europe, where trains are a viable alternative to shorter-distance flights, still lots of people would not even think about taking the train because ... don't know, flying is cool?
> it's not democratic
How is it not democratic if democracy decided to not force those CEOs do make different decisions? We can force them. Easily. Even better, we don't even have to force them, we just have to increase taxes on stuff we don't want and subsidize stuff we want. That, for example, worked extremely well to get renewables in electricity production to 50% in Germany (within 15 years, while the new government was trying to work against it).
We're just not doing it. We're not voting for politicians that would write regulation and laws that would force those CEOs to decide differently. There's no reason, nothing to keep us from doing it, no brainwashing, nothing. Just way too few people that think of climate change in the voting booth. It really sucks, but it doesn't help to blame anyone else than most of the people around you.
> Not to mention you can only even have the luxury of doing this if you're at least relatively well off. If you're poor you just buy cheapest of everything, no questions asked.
If you're poor, your CO2 emissions probably are way lower than if you're rich.
> Flying for example. In Europe, where trains are a viable alternative to shorter-distance flights, still lots of people would not even think about taking the train because...
Because the pollution of flying isn't adequately accounted for and priced as an externality. If we had a proper carbon tax (which I dislike the name, it's actually simply a carbon price) then green transportation would be cheaper than flying (and then all second-order effects would kick in: more incentive to invest in green transportation, more incentive to leave flying, etc).
> How is it not democratic if democracy decided to not force those CEOs
> We're just not doing it. We're not voting for politicians that would write regulation
Your entire argument relies on the false premise that the will of the people is translated into policy. It's not. Consider the following damning evidence:
> Your entire argument relies on the false premise that the will of the people is translated into policy.
I can only speak for Germany, where it does. Right now, the Green party has the least seats of all parties in the national parliament. Why should the parliament then do something about climate change? However, when they were in the government between '98 and '05, the put the "EEG"[1] into effect (basically just implementing subsidies for renewables), and now 50% of our electricity is produced by renewables (not including nuclear). And that happened even though the following government tried to slow the transition.
There's national elections in September in Germany. With some luck, the green party will be in the new government, right now they are 2nd in the polls. That will, undoubtedly, change national politics with respect to climate change policy.
As for the US ... not sure what your problem currently is. Does the two party/winner takes it all system lead to these problems? Or is it because the republicans basically stopped caring about the truth in the 90s to win elections, spoiling the whole political process? No idea ... however, still, under the last three democratic presidents, more was done for the middle class (and probably less wars were started) then under republican presidents, right? So it does definitely matter what party wins, right, making voting not completely irrelevant even in the US?
This is not sustainable, it's not democratic, frankly it has to change.
PS: Not to mention you can only even have the luxury of doing this if you're at least relatively well off. If you're poor you just buy cheapest of everything, no questions asked.