[falserum]

Lets start with best country of the world that is made of 300 million consumers and 1000 factory owners (also known as polluters) each of which has identical share of the market.

To reduce pollution, factory owners would need to use less polluting means (i.e. less profit) and produce less (again less profit).

What happens if 999 factory owners do adhere to pollution-reduction, while 1 of them is polluting a bit more than others? (Answer: The polluter increases his share of the market, as more profits can be reinvested; and with more market share the profit will grow even more)

The point: consumers incentivize factory owners to polute, if consumers buy stuff despite polution.

This exercise ignores legislation, but law will not change until enough of consumers/voters start to care of the topic and will be ready to pay more for less and demand for it.

[antihipocrat]

Why are owners of capital deemed to be innocent when subject to the invisible hand and not the consumer? Answer is probably due to media influence paid for by the profits I alluded to earlier

[falserum]

I would like to label guilt/innocence as irrelevant.

The scenario above, describes the dynamics of how incentives work.

As long as consumers expect stuff to be cheap, somebody will step up to provide that (reaping profits). Only highly conscious society or totally authoritarian one can make these changes (though probability of dictator caring about environmental effects is low, and probably not sustainable).

Edit: guilt/innocence are irrelevant in the sense that they do not change the outcome. If human gets into a tigers cage and gets eaten (or seriously injured), outcome was predictable without the need to know who is at fault (tiger or human).