We

In the last century, linguistic philosophers and linguists focused in part on how language itself can mislead us.  

In Genevieve Guenther's recent THE LANGUAGE OF CLIMATE POLITICS, I found an example I understood. 

Suppose Susan Goss said, "We are all responsible for climate change." I've said that myself hundreds of times. 

"We caused climate change." But did we? 

Americans do contribute to climate change. I eat pears shipped from Mexico. The shippers use fossil fuels. 

Pear-eaters created climate change. Or did they? 

Guenther points out that when we agree that all  of us are to blame, we support an ideology that protects the deeply guilty, the fossil fuel producers and their employees and their vast network of supporters. If we are all guilty, then no one is really at fault.

But we are not equal offenders. That gets hidden by the "we."

Human scum, the oil and gas people driven by greed, are making parts of the Earth uninhabitable. They do it for money. They block needed changes. They buy all the support they need to keep drilling.