If there were not 8 billion people buying shit and going places the stroke of that CEO won't do as much damage.
Also if 8 billion people want a car to go on vacation to the beach... it doesn't matter if the pen of the car manufacturing company belong to a CEO or a People's Delegate, world is going to shit regardless.
It's kind of like asking whether the vital piece of a table is the tabletop or the legs, when you don't have a functional table without either one. We don't have a functional market system without supply and demand.
In a weird way, blaming the corporations is philosophically aligned with supply-side dogma, where the corporations ("job creators") have an intrinsic motivation to produce. As if they just churn stuff out all day long, because that's what they do when the government doesn't get in their way, and it's the duty of people to consume so the output doesn't all just pile up in some great heap outside the factory.
There's a reason some call that "voodoo economics." Whatever their influence today, all corporations producing things evolved in a symbiotic relationship with consumer demand. We could guillotine all of the CEOs, and revoke every corporate charter, but it'd do jack for the environment, unless unless we also all change our lifestyle.
Blaming the corporations makes as much sense as them blaming us. It's time to move past who's to blame, and instead start fixing things.
We could guillotine all of the CEOs, and revoke every corporate charter, but it'd do jack for the environment, unless unless we also all change our lifestyle.
without those companies, the lifestyles would necessarily change.
If we don't change our lifestyle, new companies would spring up to replace them. But yeah, that's my point, no matter how it happens, our lifestyle has to change if we want a sustainable society. Production and consumption are two sides of the same coin.
Companies decide themselves what products to supply, how they are created, what materials are used, how they are packaged, how much they are transported, ...
And all of those decisions only take money into consideration.
If you want a car, a car has to be made. If you want to drive, energy needs to me used.
There's a limited amount of damage reduction that can be done with a change in the economical system.
And I'm for ending capitalism. But it would be naive to thing that without capitalism everything will be fixed. Some things will be better, but most bad things will remain a problem.
No matter what economic system you try to make. There's no place in the world for 8 billion cars. And I use car a an example, but every item or service we use needs some resources. Even if we are top efficient about how we made them... It's still not enough with 8 billion people wanting the same.
But the ideal course of action would be to also limit population worldwide.
So each human have a bigger pollution/resource consumption quota, thus being able to live a better life.
I think quality of life is going to decline worldwide because overpopulation (it probably already started in some countries) and the only government regulation that could prevent that is a regulation on the number of population.
That sustainable level that you talk about is primitivism or utopia. I don't want either.
Only solution is LESS people.
Why people have such a hard time understanding that we cannot grow infinitely (in numbers) in a world of limited resources?
I know, that the core of this is the dogma. The left removed the overpopulation problem of their dogma decades ago to gain support on certain communities and now we are paying with lots of people actively supporting the destruction of our planet and our quality of life just to squeeze a few more votes
But I don't buy dogmas. I think by myself. And I see that with that many people there's not any economical system that could work to provide a good life to every human on earth, it's impossible, there are not enough resources.
Edit: big oil wants people to feel guilty for wanting to live good. That is what people who supports uncontrolled overbreeding are, consciously or not, defending. I support that people should be able to live good, and consume without feeling guilt. Again, only way to do that is if we had less people around.
Overpopulation isn't defined by how much people there are, but by the total amount of sustainably produced goods and services divided by the total population. Fewer people producing unsustainably would also be overpopulation. We need to transition to sustainability regardless of amount of people, reducing population only leads to slower decline, not to a stop of it.
Sustainability is defined by the amount of resources that a population can take from the environment without permanently destroying it. For a bigger population that amount of resources that can be used before reaching that threshold is smaller by person.
Just imagine a tribe living of a fruit tree that gives 10 apples a year. Maybe a tribe of 10 individuals can live of that tree but a tribe. But what happen when the tribe grows and suddenly there's 100 individuals trying to live of a 10 apple tree? It's illogical to take population out of the equation, because it's one of the biggest factors, the second biggest factor is quality of life (how many apples we eat a year), and the only factor that you are considering relevant is the one with the smallest impact that is how efficiently we recollect our apples. That last factor is the one with the smallest impact in the whole equation, and it's the only you seem to consider to solve our problem. We, of course, need to be efficient because it cost nothing, but efficiency by itself is not solving the whole problem.
Your own equation and your own logic is supporting my argument that we NEED to reduce population.