Frank, I’ll just observe that putting the onus on individual consumers risks letting fossil companies and other big polluters off the hook — which is why BP ran a greenwashing campaign beginning around 1993 to persuade us that we all just have to “do our bit” to get climate change under control. Rather than blaming people for focusing first on the things that are most important in their own lives, it can be far more effective (and decent, and respectful) to listen to those issues, take them as a starting point, then discover together how faster, deeper carbon cuts will help them get the things they already know they need and want, faster and better.

When it works, it’s a slightly subtler approach than “blah blah blah”, which means it’s pointless with the likes of Boris Johnson or Mitch McConnell. But if it helps us build wider public demand for the political will we need, it’ll get us closer to the goal.

Furthermore, in late May, Postmedia refused to run paid ads by Leadnow, a social and environmental justice organization, that expose the Royal Bank of Canada as the largest financer of fossil fuel extraction in Canada.

Industry and fossil-fuel friendly governments can tell when a very large portion of the populace is too tired and worried about feeding/housing themselves or their family, and the virus-variant devastation still being left in COVID-19’s wake — all while on insufficient income — to criticize them for whatever environmental damage their policies cause/allow, particularly when not immediately observable. In fact, until recently, I had not heard Greta’s name in the mainstream corporate news-media since COVID-19 hit the world.

As individual consumers, far too many of us still recklessly behave as though throwing non-biodegradable garbage down a dark chute, or pollutants flushed down toilet/sink drainage pipes or emitted out of elevated exhaust pipes or spewed from sky-high jet engines and very tall smoke stacks — even the largest toxic-contaminant spills in rarely visited wilderness — can somehow be safely absorbed into the air, water, and land (i.e. out of sight, out of mind); like we’re inconsequentially dispensing of that waste into a black-hole singularity, in which it’s compressed into nothing.

No where in this article does it mention the toxic tailing ponds leaking into the Athabasca water shed or how they plan to clean them up or the contaminated an area the size of Germany. Oil clean up costs in Alberta are estimated at $260 Billion. Maybe environmentalists should put that on a bill board next to the ecocide advertising of the Canadian oil companies and the Alberta government.