Yeah it’s a dumb, thought-terminating stat that makes you sound naive, like you haven’t thought any of this through and your beliefs are fed by confirmation bias as you seek out stats online that support your initial view.

As leftists there is a pervasive stereotype that we don’t understand the real world, yet our natural strength is that the facts are in our side. We need to be doing the hard work of reading discussing and building coherent world views so when people talk to us they code leftists as those who have their facts straight.

The stat is from here. It is frequently misquoted and misunderstood, but more importantly (as per your analysis) this isn’t just private corporations being wasteful and blasting CO2 in the air because they’re moustache-twirling villains, this is private and public enterprises that extract fossil fuels for energy.

Even if it wasn’t, but it was just a measure of how much CO2 private companies produce, that would still mostly be reflective of the energy cost of producing goods for the imperial core, not waste from irresponsible corporations.

Edit: if people are looking for a coherent analysis of how production and fossil fuels are related I’d recommend reading the chapter China as Chimney of the World from Andreas Malm’s Fossil Capital.

The argument is a little silly, but you can kind of wrangle a sensible point out of it. An important thing to consider is the length of the carbon cycles, or in other words the time frame of different carbon reservoirs. As long as we keep pumping carbon from the very long time frame underground reservoirs, how we end up putting it in the short-term reservoirs matters relatively little. And corporations keep pumping it because it is profitable, and it is very profitable (top 5 industries), to the point where consumer choices seem to only plausibly affect the schedule of the pumping. They aren’t shutting down productive oil wells because there isn’t enough demand.

The sad part is that most people making the argument seem to be advocating for some vague kind of state intervention, which is equally unlikely as everyone doing their individual part.

The real solution is, as always, to educate, agitate, and organize.

We live in a deeply extractionist society that tends to believe earth is a miraculous entity that can heal itself no matter how much we abuse it or take out of it. These brainworms tend to permeate leftists as well. There will need to be an intense restructuring of society after we win that isn’t simply based on class. Sea freight and trade should be kept to a necessity basis, commodity production has to end at this point, not for communist ideals but for the planet. Industrial animal agriculture and fishing need to end. But you can’t restructure society without having control over the means of production. That being said I think some of the people who say it’s not worth talking about until we cross that bridge are deluding themselves. Climate change is the biggest radicalizing point for people my age and younger from what I’ve seen, and just going “we’ll achieve communism and then figure out how to stop emissions” isn’t a particularly inspiring rallying cry.

broke: “do your part! If we all buy hybrids and turn off the water when we brush our teeth we can beat climate change together!”

woke: “individual behaviors will never stop climate change because corporations pollute far more than individuals ever will, the only solution is to abolish capitalism”

bespoke: “engaging in reckless consumerism simply on the grounds that individuals don’t pollute as much as corporations ignores that 1) consumer-derived profits enable corporations to pollute further and 2) a lot of that pollution is generated by manufacturing and shipping the consumer good you’re thinking about buying. The only solution is to abolish capitalism, but reducing your consumerism both starves corporations of the profits they need to operate and accelerates their downfall, and also mitigates and delays the impact of climate change one tiny little bit”