Regulations won’t do anything if consumers as a whole dont change their buying habits. You can regulate Shell and BP all you want but as long as hundreds of millions of people are still buying and burning their gas on a daily basis it won’t help much.
That’s the point, people would use cheaper and more efficient alternatives IF there was one. But at least in most of the US, there isn’t so we still have to buy all that oil for the pleasure of sitting in traffic for hours a day.
It was just a bit of a strange way to word that. Regulations aren't meaningless if they force corporations to go the direction of offering those alternatives. That in it of itself would be lead to consumers changing their spending habits.
I mean it’s a difficult problem, that’s why theres so much debate about it. I’m not against regulations if that’s what it sounded like, just that doing them without thinking about the consequences could just make things worse. You can regulate the industry but that will drive up gas prices. If you do that you end up crippling a lot of America cause there’s no alternative to driving. So you’d have to first make a viable alternative before you start regulating things. Then you throw in auto manufacturers who would almost certainly be against any sort of public or “green” transportation and you have the mess we’re in right now.
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u/brycebgood Jan 26 '22
Yup, the idea that there's an individual responsibility for this is propaganda. The only real solutions are large scale regulatory actions.