Short-term catastrophes don't negate long-term habit changes though. That oil spill doesn't impact all water bodies across the entire planet at the same time. While I think more developed nations should introduce more punishments to prevent things like this from happening, we have technologies that can mitigate these things once they do happen.

Progress may be up and down, but as long as the slope trends upwards, it's better than nothing.

Message stays the same: do as much as you can when you can in the specific ways you can.

[–] Cabrio@lemmy.world 2 points 1 year ago (1 children)

No, but it does more local damage than 100,000 people do.

[–] ParsnipWitch@feddit.de 6 points 1 year ago (1 children)

So, what are you saying, exactly? That the individual shouldn't take any responsibility for their own behaviour?

[–] Cabrio@lemmy.world 4 points 1 year ago* (last edited 1 year ago)

I'm saying that the scale of individual effect to corporate producer effect is so large that your individual responsibility even pushed to it's maximum will have zero meaningful impact. Not just that, but the combined individual responsibility of the majority of citizens is not something you can magic into existance especially when most are too poor to seek or have access to alternatives.

To give you an idea of the scale, the ~90,000 container ships that are transporting daily use twice the amount of fuel as the ~1,450,000,000 cars on the road globally. You could make every single land based personal vehicle in the world use zero fuel, and only remove 30% of the global fuel usage. Keep in mind that includes land based commercial transport, and doesn't even touch aircraft.

Plastics make up 4% of global oil use, you not using products because they were made with single use plastics doesn't stop them being made, but if it did, would still account for just about nothing.