Without digging into the validity of the numbers, it doesn't seem so odd to me. Agricultural and industrial uses of anything are on a huge, well, industrial scale, and domestic uses are numerous but relatively small in comparison and people tend to overestimate them because these uses are what most of us more directly and frequently observe.
It's sort of like CO2 production. Many people get encouraged to do their nearly symbolic reduction "contribution", while real CO2 production remains the same or rises since something like 80% of all emissions are generated by just a few dozen corporations globally.
I wanted to add that the CO2 footprint was a marketing campaign designed to change the narrative away from the companies that caused the majority of CO2 production, towards the private household.
It was the advertisement agency Ogilvy and Mather who invented the carbon footprint for BP.
Sometimes it's frightening how easily gullible people are.
> 80% of all emissions are generated by just a few dozen corporations globally.
Which ones?
> Many people get encouraged to do their nearly symbolic reduction "contribution"
I think that's a fallacy of the climate change denier crowd, who go from 'it's not happening' to 'humans aren't causing it' to 'there's nothing we can do about it' or 'there is nothing you can do about it'. It's also a fallacy of the right that collective action by the left is powerless - it's an effective fallacy, because many on the left believe it!
Also, i'm not a "climate change denier" (a loaded, idiotic and ideological phrase to begin with, especially because it often gets used when someone even debates elements of something so complex as climate change) But I do think that one of the petro/gas/plastics corporate world's great PR tricks was to throw the mass media onus on consumer CO2 emissions and help create a massive consumer guilt campaign about individual activity while happily continuing to pollute on a literally industrial scale.
This is not to say that individuals should be wasteful and reckless in their personal environmental habits, but idiocies like mass anti-straw campaigns are partly absurd in comparison to industrial atmospheric contamination and etc.
Yes, much of it ultimately ties into consumer consumption, but much more of the blame should also tie into corporate emissions creation.
It's sort of like CO2 production. Many people get encouraged to do their nearly symbolic reduction "contribution", while real CO2 production remains the same or rises since something like 80% of all emissions are generated by just a few dozen corporations globally.