Colbert says corporations, not individuals, are causing climate change. He’s not thinking clearly.

I just watched this video, in which Steven Colbert basically says that sure, you as an individual can do little things to combat climate change, but it’s corporations that are really causing the problem.

Well, hmmm. It’s true that Amazon, as an often-picked example, has a very large carbon footprint. But it’s individuals who are pushing the Purchase button on Amazon.com that triggers all the activity. Putting the blame on Amazon is just … weird.

What you should really ask about Amazon is whether their carbon footprint is higher or lower than the alternative. In other words, given that people want to buy stuff, would less pollution be caused by doing it the way we used to, shipping it to stores in shopping malls and having people drive around to make their purchases? The answer is ABSOLUTELY NOT! Having stuff shipped in big trucks to distribution centers and then to consumers’ doors in electric vans along routes is far more efficient.

And yes, Amazon’s huge AWS service for virtual computers uses a ton of energy. But the alternative is having many thousands of companies do it themselves, buying a bunch of physical computers, setting them up in air-conditioned rooms, and managing them. For a number or reasons, using virtual servers at Amazon is much more efficient. And it’s much more reliable as well.

You can’t just look at one side of the ledger, pointing the finger at a company’s carbon footprint. Well, you CAN, but you’ll just be confusing matters rather than addressing the problem. Please don’t do that.

But oil and gas companies — grrr! How I wish we had eliminated subsidies for them and instituted a carbon tax back when it was first proposed, in 1973, using some of the funds to incentivize the development of green energy technologies. Products would be more energy-efficient, green technologies would be more advanced, the US would be a leader in them, and we wouldn’t be staring down the barrel of a 2-degree global temperature increase. Our government leaders failed us here; they should have found a way to get it done instead of repeatedly kicking the can down the road.