the_dunk_tank

I'm not saying Americans are innocent. The point of intervention responsibility is to pry apart responsibility in the moral or casual sense and responsibility in the ability-to-effect-meaningful-change sense. The idea that climate change is happening because ordinary people won't give up their SUVs and stop eating beef is wrong and deliberate misinformation on the part of companies and governments who want you to think that you bear individual accountability for the problem. That's insane. The overwhelming majority of damage is being done by the wealthiest 1,000 people in the world, the 100 largest companies, and the US Military. Those people (and those institutions) bear the intervention responsibility here, because they're in a position in which changes to their behavior will meaningfully affect the global environment. Becoming a vegan or never flying as a consumer are morally good, but they're not meaningful interventions in the grand scheme of things, even if the overwhelming majority of ordinary people pursue them.

Consider the inverse case: white supremacy and systemic racism. Virtually none of us bear moral responsibility for this: we never owned slaves, didn't design a racist oligarchy of a government, and so on. That doesn't mean we don't have intervention responsibility to fix it, though, because we can enact meaningful resistance to white supremacy in our day-to-day lives by being anti-racist in our actual deeds, fighting for the dignity and rights of marginalized people, and generally enacting resistance.