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.

People quoting that statistic are missing the point.

Why is it that some tiny number of companies are responsible for some tremendous percentage of greenhouse gas output?

It’s because they’re operating for profit and pollution comes from the point of production.

Of course someone has to transport the funco pops to the Walmart, so it’s not all at the factories that transform fossil hydrocarbons and trees into plastic dolls in cardboard boxes, but it’s that crazy percentage.

Can’t we just stop buying pops and stop that emission? No, because the pollution comes from the place they’re made and if you were a capitalist with a funco pops factory would you close down when everyone stops buying em or just make new molds to make something else? If you bought too many jet skis and can’t afford to retool, what’s the person who buys your factory gonna do, not make plastic shit?

No, they bought a plastic molding factory. They’re gonna make hydrocarbons into shapes they can sell.

People who use that stat to justify their individual choices are missing the point, individual choices don’t matter unless the social context they’re made in allows them to be effective.

It doesn’t matter that you throw your yogurt cup in the blue bin when it just gets collected and emptied into the pacific garbage raft.

It doesn’t matter that you threw your yogurt cup on the sidewalk when the street sweeper dumps into a shred and sort facility, you know, that exists and is real (this is sarcasm).

That doesn’t mean it’s okay to not care or throw your trash on the ground or whatever, just that saving the planet isn’t the reason it’s not okay.

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.

i won’t speak to what collective effort in bringing manufacturing to heel looks like, but i personally think it’s important for individuals to just generally not be wasteful, as much as their own personal power allows.

as individuals, we all exist along the line of having some power. people with less power are less culpable. they can’t avoid wasting energy due to inefficiencies created by capitalism (their landlord, building codes, zoning, etc). they can only eat what they can afford and have time for. they need to survive. they are helping others survive. you get the idea. most of humanity under capitalism has very little power or control over their resource usage, unless they are willing to have some primitive, unpleasant existence. i think that is a sort of trap as well.

for a lot of us westoids and ameroids, we might use a lot more resources to survive that our cousins around the world, but our power to conserve is still structurally very limited. but among those that have some power… like the ability to relocate, own a home, choose an employer/career, walk to work, make decisions for a group, make recommendations to a group, create organizational policy, etc, we have a responsibility to use that power to conserve resources and mitigate/adapt to climate change. of course, all that in isolation isn’t enough. collective action to go after and shut down very powerful bad faith actors and organizations is crucial. but that doesn’t absolve individuals with some individual power from pushing for conservation and just transitions.

we’re not going to get there from “green capitalism” or green-branded conspicuous consumption. collective action against capitalism is the real fight, but for those on the left with a little bit of juice have a responsibility to push where they can and make sure we are targeting other decision makers and not shaming broke people for not getting an electric audi or whatever.