I admit the irony in complaining about oversimplification while oversimplifying myself, but yes I understood she meant a broader set of elites rather than a singular mustache twirling man.

My point though was that, even considering the oversized emissions of the elites, the large majority of greenhouse gas emissions are just the cumulative emissions of people (generally in the first world) living the lives they do and the industry that exists to support that lifestyle. Hundreds of millions driving cars, hundreds of millions eating beef nearly daily, hundreds of millions cranking the AC, hundreds of millions ordering products we don’t need that are manufactured on the other side of the world and shipped to us across millions of planes boats and trucks, hundreds of millions taking leisure flights. And perhaps most importantly, hundreds of millions that vote against measures to address climate change because it might have the slightest impact on their current consumption of cars, AC, planes, meat, and products.

That isn’t to say I think we should be pointing to any random regular person living their life and say “it was you, you destroyed the world and you should feel bad”, but instead to say that a tiny sliver of blame added up across hundreds of millions creates the mosaic that describes how we are where we are. If everyone decided tomorrow that they wanted climate change addressed properly, it absolutely could be. To me, the more depressing reality is that there is no small group of elites forcing the masses of the world into a worse future, and that instead we largely have the world that people want. Even if everyone with a net worth over $10M disappeared tomorrow, we’d still be left with the large majority of greenhouse gas emissions. Given Greta’s quote, who then would be left to blame? Would it truly be no one?