I agree to an extent. More often than not, the purchasing decisions of "consumers" are not free choices, and even if they want to do things that are more ethical, sometimes those ethics conflict.

Until recently, I didn't have the luxury of caring about the supply chain of most of my purchases because I didn't have enough money to buy anything but the cheapest version of what I needed.

I also try to buy or build repairable devices to reduce waste and make it so that I am buying fewer things in the long run. Unfortunately, primarily because of decisions made by large companies and investors, the components to do this can often only be found on AliExpress. There are no local options, and there are no options that have a transparent supply chain.

On top of that, the monopolistic companies and the politicians that support them have created a system with a lot of inertia that removes options for "consumers" by undercutting the market and buying out competitors until nothing but the monopoly remains. Lots of towns only have a Walmart and/or a Dollar Tree where they can purchase household items because those companies put all the local shops out of business. The people there are stuck at no fault of their own.

The people who do have the money to make better climate decisions with their spending are definitely in a better position to make more free decisions, but, again, companies have not designed products to have interchangeable parts or to be repairable at all. Often times alternatives just simply do not exist.

Cell phones, laptops, cars, etc. are all basically required for people in the US because of decisions that individuals have no control over.

And finally, the distribution of impact of an individual is heavily skewed toward the rich. The changes that poorer people can make do have some impact, and there are knock-on effects that make those impacts stronger, but to frame this as the fault of anyone outside of capitalists and their pet politicians is pretty disingenuous.

In short, people usually can't make free decisions about how they spend their money, and even if they could, they don't have all the information they need to make good decisions, and they are actively being fed mis/disinformation to further keep them in the dark. To blame them is probably wrong, and to think that individual action is worth putting effort into at the cost of collective and political action is a bad idea. It should really only be a supplement.

A whole lot of people hate this notion because it essentially frames it as the consumer's fault, but at the end of the day it kind of is.

Absolutely. Producers and consumers have joint responsibility for getting us where we are. Climate action requires joint action by consumers and by (or, more likely, against) producers.

Because politicians follow the money. And they understand voters follow the money. So polls may show that legislation against fossil fuel companies is popular. But politicians look at all the gas consumers buy and ask themselves "what will voters do if we pass fossil fuel legislation and gas gets more expensive"? And then they decide not to pass fossil fuel legislation, because even if voters say they want fossil fuel legislation they know how the voters will respond if that legislation makes their consumption habits more expensive.

It's a lot easier to pass higher gas taxes in cities where 90% of residents take public transit to work than in cities where 5% do.

I was ranting in a different thread about the "discourses of delay" that corporate and right-wing propagandists use to delay climate action. And the fascinating thing is, the idea that only individual consumption matters (the BP carbon footprint ad campaign) and the idea that only the actions of corporations matter (a typical American activist attitude) are both industry propaganda. The former is meant to discourage political action. The latter is meant to discourage individual action. And by framing it as one against the other, propagandists discourage us from taking effective action on either.

We can do both. We have to do both.

There's a better way to frame all this: change comes from within. We obviously have to vote and pay attention to politics and speak up to our elected officials because that's how "not being ruled by a monarch" works. But ultimately all real changes, even in the world, come from within.