Letter: Consumers are as guilty in the court of climate change

From Martin Greenwood, Perth, Western Australia

Chris Lee asks us to make fossil fuel companies responsible for paying reparations to lower-income countries over the damage that has been inflicted on them by climate change(Letters, 3 December 2022).

Unless he grows all his own food, walks everywhere, doesn’t use electricity and declines to buy anything from a shop that is made in a factory or delivered by a truck, Lee will, like every other resident of a Western nation and the great majority of residents of lower-income nations, be reliant on fossil fuels for much in his life.

In that sense, we are all complicit in the so-called crime of fossil fuel consumption.