It's never us that's the problem, is it, it's always them, the other

Apparently climate change is all the creation of a few fossil fuel company billionaires and entirely nowt to do with any of us:

It makes sense that anyone facing conditions as awful as those caused by the smoke this week would get angry. The trick is to get angry at the right people: fossil fuel billionaires who couldn’t care less about the horrors they’ve unleashed.

We’ll leave aside the obvious logical comparison here for simple good taste reasons, but there’s a definite side of human nature that wants to blame everything that goes wrong, whatever goes wrong, on that other. It’s them over there, not us. No, really - they’re to blame, just couldn't be cute and cuddly us now, could it?

Varied attempts have tried to blame things on the Trots, the bourgeois, wreckers, whites, colonialism, The English, Rosicrucians and the Illuminati. But climate change, whatever we might think of how bad it is or isn’t, isn’t something being done to us - certainly not us rich world folk. It’s something we’re doing.

Consumer demand fuels these companies’ decisions, to be sure.

Well, yes. Without the demand to be able to transport ourselves, heat our lives, cook our food - even have food grown that we can eat - there would be no climate change. There also wouldn’t be 8 billion of us either and most human beings do rather like being able to live (that’s a testable proposition, the number who don’t equals the suicide statistics).

The fossil fuel billionaires are only such because we like to transport ourselves, heat, have and cook food and so on. There is no “other” forcing this upon us. It’s also true that there’s no solution to climate change - if one is even needed - without us out here changing our behaviour. Expropriating, eliminating, even topping on Tower Hill, those fossil fuel billionaires won’t change that in the slightest.

The entire system is based on our desire for the ability to drive off for a hot steak in a warm room. There is no “other”, other than us, causing it all. Nope, not even the Rosicrucians. Nor the Illuminati.

Climate change is not in the billionaires or the fossil fuel companies dear Brutus, it is in ourselves.

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