Amazons worst contribution to the world was leaving people with the expectation that they need to have 2 day shipping for every single item they purchase. The climate impact alone is insane.
In most cases where I choose Amazon for shipping speed reasons the alternative I'm considering is making a special trip to a brick and mortar store by car. I don't know how to do the math to figure out which of those is worse for the climate, but Amazon is definitely not strictly worse.
By focusing on local maxima you’re ignoring that both of the behaviors you’ve described, on a societal scale, are terrible for the environment. Sure, it’s on Amazon or Exxon or whatever other company at the end of the day. But it’s individual human behavior that gives companies the impetus and the air cover to destroy the planet. But like so many other things, humanity, and especially Westerners, won’t learn these lessons until they’re on the doorstep.
Sure, I'm fine to focus on the individual human behavior, but that's a completely different argument than your original post made. To review that comment:
> Amazons worst contribution to the world was leaving people with the expectation that they need to have 2 day shipping for every single item they purchase. The climate impact alone is insane.
Here you're very clearly not discussing "individual human behavior that gives companies the impetus and the air cover to destroy the planet", you're directly blaming Amazon for creating high expectations for delivery times.
Your argumentation here feels like a motte and bailey to me. You attack Amazon for offering 2-day shipping because that's bad for the environment, I point out that the alternative that I would have used in the pre-Amazon world likely wasn't any better, you retreat into a more general attack on large-scale societal problems stemming from individual human behaviors.
I engaged with your bailey and found it lacking. I don't disagree with your motte, but that's not the conversation we were having.
