Often times there is quite a bit of responsibility and stress placed upon the consumer to work towards reducing their carbon footprint. What people don't necessarily realize is that it's not only the consumer's job to do that, but also the producers. Pretty much all of the producers are major world corporations and companies and they're a massive contributor to the world's carbon footprint. The unfortunate thing is, corporations are unwilling to step up and work towards creating products that are cleaner, safer, and that use renewable energy because it would cost more. Except the thing is, yes, at first, it would cost the companies lots of money, but as they went on producing these products it would eventually become cheaper and more accessible. So, while some responsibility falls onto the consumer, it mainly and LARGELY falls onto the corporations and companies.

I very much agree, I believe that in our American society there even is a purpose blame that was put on the consumer to make it seem like it is a problem that can be fixed by picking up your trash and turning lights. Yet in reality it is a societal problem that can only be fixed by changing society. This means acknowledging that corporations have a large responsibility to fix this and that on their own they will not change and their goal will only be the short term gain of making more money. Also in the end environmental damage will create a bigger economic crisis in the future which will be worse for these corporations.

I totally agree with your idea, picking up trash and reusing plastic bags and bottles can only go so far. At the end of the day, the main contributors to pollution are the major corporations and factories. There have been movements within large corporations to lower their footprint, many stores now promote reusable shopping bags and charge money for the plastic ones, restaurants are cracking down on the use of plastic straws and shifting to paper ones. However there is still much more that can be done. Coming off the pandemic, I think one thing that we can learn is the benefits of remote work. Companies should support employees to work at home which is more sustainable and may even be more efficient. This is just one simple idea but it would be monumental for corporations to lead by example within saving our planet.

I do agree that the major corporations will need to solve our issues of pollution and that they will need to be responsible for creating a cleaner planet. The only problem is that these companies will not take the short-term loss that would be required for a major change in the industry. To them, it is not worth the positive publicity or the satisfaction of creating a better world when they are making the money that they are in their current state. On top of this, they are under severe pressure from not only the heads of the company and of the industry but also the stock shareholders who are expecting continual growth. They will not only lose money in possible sales but they will lose vital investment dollars that are coming in based on the fact that they are continuing to make healthy profits.