A fixation on system change alone opens the door to a kind of cynical self-absolution that divorces personal commitment from political belief. This is its own kind of false consciousness, one that threatens to create a cheapened climate politics incommensurate with this urgent moment.
[…]
Because here’s the thing: When you choose to eat less meat or take the bus instead of driving or have fewer children, you are making a statement that your actions matter, that it’s not too late to avert climate catastrophe, that you have power. To take a measure of personal responsibility for climate change doesn’t have to distract from your political activism—if anything, it amplifies it.
The issue is, the “wisdom” isn’t “don’t worry about personal emissions”, it’s “take voting extremely seriously. Become a single issue voter, that issue should be climate”
But there’s a psychological thing where people take the discount today and the payment later.
Bullshit, straight up bullshit. It makes a difference at scale, but at scale it is miniscule when compared to even small mass polluters.
That’s not to say you should live as pollution-causing as possible, but spare me the pearl clutching over my paper plate usage.
the corporations will not save us. be very wary of any “solution” that allows you to continue unchanged and to shift all responsibility to someone else, there’s a reason that perspective is so pervasive
Like I’m all for that we need to hold a fire under corporations. But we also need to change too. Just because they do like, 70% of it doesn’t mean we’re off the hook. We’re buying those products that they pollute for. We drive the cars that are polluting. We buy the cheap clothes that they shamelessly pollute. We each have to change.
Corporations have absolutely no incentive to change, consumers need to vote with their wallets if they want something to happen. But no, everytime someone points out this blindingly obvious fact we get the “uhm actually corporations need to change, it’s not my fault they’re feeding off my unsustainable habits.”
We have to work together, we only have power to effect change when we work together, solidarity is our strength.
Yep. Who did Dasani bottle all that water for? Paying humans with mouths
BP oil company pushed the idea that our individual carbon footprints matter so that everyone can share the blame of what the fossil fuel industry has done.
Don’t fall for it. Only corporations pollute enough to matter. Only corporations can provide alternatives to fossil fuels. Only corporations can make a meaningful reduction to greenhouse gas emissions.
The most significant difference individuals can make is to create political and legal pressure by voting and protesting.
The most significant difference individuals can make is to create political and legal pressure by voting and protesting.
Well can also stop giving them our money. Reduce consumption of their products through alternatives and overall reduction. We can also divest our investments away from funds that include their shares.
I’m not saying to do nothing as individuals.
Just pointing out that the fossil fuel industry paid a marketing team to push the idea of individual carbon footprints for a reason.
100 companies have been responsible for 71% of global greenhouse gas emissions. That means that the remaining 29% of emissions are shared by all the other companies and consumers. Even if you split that remainder evenly between all other companies and consumers, that’s only 14% all emissions being caused by consumers and it’s probably more likely in the single digits.
This is why the fossil fuel industry pays a marketing team to get the public focused on their individual carbon footprint. So you’re focused on the less than 14% of the total emissions instead of the other 86%
That includes downstream emissions. So if your car runs on BP oil, those emissions would be part of BPs emissions.
There is a reason BP is not advertising people to drop their cars. BP wants two things in its campaign. First of all to make clear that it is your lifestyles fault and secondly that besides munor changes you do not have to change that at all.
They are responsible for those downstream emissions because they entrenched themselves and made it so the majority of people don’t have a choice. Even going so far as to influence how our cities are built to make us dependent on them.
Most people cannot afford to get a car let alone an EV. The only reason we are seeing EVs in the first place is because of government intervention.
If the individual doesn’t have a choice because of choices made by the fossil fuel industry then the individual isn’t responsible for those emissions.
Which, as I said, is exactly why we should stop giving them our money. Divestment is a key thing people can will hurt these companies massively.
“We” as in consumers don’t use enough to hurt companies by divesting.
By all means do anything you can to reduce your individual carbon footprint. But do so knowing it is just a drop in the ocean. Such a small difference that it might as well be nothing.
But if you convince the public that our individual choices can fix climate change then we end up with paper straws instead of systemic change.
Why not vote and protest and consume less?
Exactly. They’re right, but it’s just a way to not feel guilty about driving a gas guzzler or using a gas furnace. No the corporations are more guilty, but that doesn’t make you innocent for just shifting the blame, the same tactic they did. We ALL need to change our ways.
I didn’t say “don’t consume less”.
Just pointing out that the fossil fuel industry paid a marketing team to push the idea of individual carbon footprints for a reason.
100 companies have been responsible for 71% of global greenhouse gas emissions. That means that the remaining 29% of emissions are shared by all the other companies and consumers. Even if you split that remainder evenly between all other companies and consumers, that’s only 14% all emissions being caused by consumers and it’s probably more likely in the single digits.
This is why the fossil fuel industry pays a marketing team to get the public focused on their individual carbon footprint. So you’re focused on the less than 14% of the total emissions instead of the other 86%
That factoid is vastly misinterpreted. In particular, the term “responsible for” does not mean “emitted”.
The study it’s referencing studied only fossil fuel producers. And it credited all emissions from anyone who burned fuel from that producer to that producer. So if I buy a tank of gas from Chevron and burn it, my emissions are credited to Chevron for purposes of that study.
The study is not saying that 100 companies emit 71% of global emissions. It’s saying that 100 companies produce 71% of the fossil fuels used globally.
Why wouldn’t Chevron be responsible for the emissions for the fuel they provide? The fossil fuel industry has entrenched themselves and made it as difficult as possible to not use their products. Even to go so far as to influence how our cities are built.
I’d love to not use any fossil fuels but I can’t afford solar panels or a heat pump so I have to either burn gas or my family freezes to death. I have to get my electricity from coal because my family can’t survive without electricity.
I don’t have a choice because of the choices made by the fossil fuel industry.
“70% of fossil fuel emissions come from corporations”
“That number attributes your personal emissions to corporations, you should also try to lower your personal impact.”
“Why would I lower my personal impact, the corporations are responsible for 70% of all emissions!”
Lol come on now, at least engage with the fucking argument and facts smh
So you’re saying you’re plan is for individuals to choose the choice that is not an option?
You’re saying the solution is for everyone to stop using electricity?
Stop driving to work and earning money is the solution?
Buy solar panels without a house to put them on?
This is why the individual carbon foot print doesn’t matter. Because it is a systemic problem. So the large majority of people don’t have the luxury of being able to reduce their carbon footprint. And it is such a small percentage to begin with.
This is why BP is paying a marketing firm to convince the public to focus on their individual carbon footprint.
We need systemic change not paper straws.
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While this is basically true, what it ignores is the impact personal decisions make on the ethos around us to build support for legal pressure. I have family that doesn’t disbelieve climate change but isn’t motivated by it, and by us going mostly meatless and buying and EV they’ve started meatless Mondays and Thursdays and are considering an EV for their next car. Our individual actions ripple out, and create a public normalization for these types of changes so that it isnt an uphill battle to get uninformed laypeople to care about climate policy at the polling stations
I’m vegan, I drive an EV and I’m saving money for solar and a heat pump.
Just pointing out that the fossil fuel industry paid a marketing team to push the idea of individual carbon footprints for a reason.
100 companies have been responsible for 71% of global greenhouse gas emissions. That means that the remaining 29% of emissions are shared by all the other companies and consumers. Even if you split that remainder evenly between all other companies and consumers, that’s only 14% all emissions being caused by consumers and it’s probably more likely in the single digits.
This is why the fossil fuel industry pays a marketing team to get the public focused on their individual carbon footprint. So you’re focused on the less than 14% of the total emissions instead of the other 86%
I’m not saying me driving an EV does statistically anything to reduce carbon emissions, or even that if I got all my friends and family to go vegan and bike instead of drive cars that it would. I am saying that the broad public doesn’t care about these issues enough to consume differently or vote for policy or politicians that make their lives less convenient in order to fight climate change, and that instead our individual actions to avert climate change contribute to a public ethos that can accept lifestyle changes and that may potentially hold the mega polluting corporations to account and fix our throw-away durable goods culture in a way that media-demonized protests and pestering bought-and-paid politicians never can.
Other quotes I found compelling from the article were these:
Ultimately, a personal action versus political action binary is unhelpful. The environmental movement needs to sustain a way to do both: agitate and organize for systemic change while also still encouraging individual behavior changes.
[…]
Which is to say that personal action and collective, political action are self-reinforcing. Individual lifestyle changes can act as a kind of alloy that strengthens political activism. To do the difficult work of walking more lightly on the planet is to bind commitment to conviction.Exactly, also systemic change will have individual consequences. By bearing them early we demonstrate that these burdens are smaller than often imagined.
I love the taste of meat. I struggled to imagine a life without it. I have been a pescatarian now for nearly 3 years. It’s inconvenient at times, but not as much as it once was. Seafood is a treat for me, and I imagine many people can live with meat like that. I am healthier, and I am happy with my choice. By making systemic changes to food people will eat less meat, but while the transition will be uncomfortable, the end result won’t be nearly as bad as they fear.
The author is somehow surprised at the reactions they get when they nitpick people on their individual actions.
This week I decided that my next six months will be dedicated to making solarpunk stuff, stay with an eye open for me and hopefully it encourages you to create some stuff to.
There is an alternative, it is better and we are already making it true!
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. We’re feeding the beast and in doing so they’ll make sure there’s lax regulation and no push for change and what we need to do is starve the beast so it falls over dead. That’s the only way change will ever happen when CEOs are taking senators out for dinner. Every so often pick some horrible company and vow to never give them another penny again, and keep adding to that list
Edit: I work at the post office and process 4 TRAILERS worth of mail from Shein alone (not even counting Temu). Every day people in my metro region buy 4 trailers worth of cheap plastic shit from one company a lot of people haven’t even heard of. You all really don’t see that as a problem? And then those guys go lobbying and politicians kick the can right down the road. It is how it was, how it is, and how it will be
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.
but to frame this as the fault of anyone outside of capitalists and their pet politicians is pretty disingenuous.
Friend, anyone who continues to go to Starbucks has zero right to complain that their CEO uses a jet to commute hundreds of miles to work. Anyone who buys 3M has zero right to complain that they’re pumping PFAS into drinking water. Full motherfucking stop. It’s not disingenious to call out enablers. World’s chock full overflowing with half-ass slacktivists that think it’s trendy just to talk about how bad corporations are yet blow their credit cards on bullshit
These companies are getting this pressure because they are well known and because of coordinated collective action against them. By all means, avoid them. That said, there are tons of reasons that people still buy from these companies.
For 3M, they produce the most readily available and performant masks, respirators, air filters and adhesives, which are a necessity in a lot of situations. For instance, I build my own air purifiers using standard HVAC filters and PC fans for myself and friends/family (so that they have have repairable units that use standard parts), and often 3M filters are the only performant ones that I can buy while avoiding Amazon, another company worth boycotting. In addition to that, 3M products are used in sooo much stuff these days that it’s very easy to support them without knowing about it.
For Starbucks, I know of quite a few towns where Starbucks is the only coffee shop (because they aggressively forced out the competitors), and there is no library or similar public space available. I’m sure as hell not going to tell the people of that town where Starbucks is the only quiet place that they can read or work or get a coffee that they are the problem here.
There are tons of other, similar situations that force or heavily influence people to buy from shitty companies.
On top of that, I’m positive that the vast majority of alternatives are similarly bad, and they just haven’t been the target of collective action yet. There is no ethical consumption under capitalism.
This whole argument gives very “yet you participate in the system, how curious” energy, and is pretty divorced from reality.
On that note you should check out demcifilter. It’s not HEPA but I haven’t dusted a PC in a decade using their stuff
I’m talking about things like this: https://www.cleanairkits.com/products/luggables
Yeah they do custom sizes, it’s just a supremely fine mesh, like you blow into it and it gets clogged with water droplets, that kind of fine. They sell filters to fit standard case sizes, magnetic or screw-in, but also cut custom sizes, they’ll cut a spool even
Yeah, I think there is some confusion here. This isn’t to protect a computer, it’s to cycle all the air in a room in a few minutes and filter down to pm2.5. HVAC filters are a very different kind of product than what this company offers.
The line is reduce, reuse and then recycle for a reason. Not buying something and buying second hand are affordable for everybody. Unfortunatly the later takes more time.
Nowhere local stocks the parts to repair most second-hand items. Parts for older items are often hard to find because they are no longer made. I mean, you’re replying to someone who builds repairable versions of such items. Why do you think that is necessary?
Do you have the skill-set to do as they do? I do, and yet, I assure you, skills, a 3D Printer and a friggen machine-shop at my disposal can only do so much to compensate for a supply chain that has been absolutely gutted and continually re-worked to force consumption, and of products from the far end of the globe, at that.
Most poorer people straight up cannot afford the better option up front.
Lots of things are basic social requirements if you want to have access to lucrative careers. If you’re not wearing the right clothes, good luck at job fairs, interviews, networking events, etc. Can’t afford the pricey ones that will last? Your options are get the cheap ones or have a worse chance at income that you need to survive. This is, again, not a free choice.
On top of that, again, the distribution of climate impact is skewed heavily toward the rich. Without including that in these arguments and articles, and simply saying everyone needs to do these things, people are biasing the burden on poorer people.
Finding good secondhand options takes a lot of time. So much so that it is literally a job that people have. More often than not, the decision is frumpy clothes that will make you stand out in a bad way that can easily affect job prospects, self esteem, how your kids are treated at school, etc. or to buy the cheap stuff online.
Most of the time, the stuff at the thrift store isn’t much cheaper than the cheap stuff online, and often it IS the cheap stuff that will break soon that people have discarded. Take a walk through your local thrift store and it’s probably overflowing with clothes from Shien, halfway broken knockoff IKEA furniture, and cheap (probably broken) single-use kitchen gadgets.
None of this even touches on the carefully targeted advertising on social media that primes people to have the kind of consumption behavior that fuels these companies to begin with.
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.
But the thing is, money speaks to politicians. That’s why we’re in this mess in the first place. For example, we passed regulations on a bunch of forever chemicals, 3M successfully lobbied for exemptions and got a bunch of exemptions. Then they got caught dumping a bunch of PFAS and they say “oopsie” and pay a 10 billion dollar fine and everything is good again (for them, not for us). But they’re only doing that because people give 3M money. 3M only exists because of money. No money = no 3M. Delete these pieces of shit simply by withholding from them
Money in politics is poison, sure, and we’re definitely fucked if it isn’t solved immediately, if not sooner.
I was speaking in the assumption that everyone here would be on the same page about that.
A lot of people (surprisingly) aren’t on the same page and think that begging for policy change can somehow bring about policy change or don’t acknowledge the relationship of consumer and corporation in a zero sum environment. Best way to kill a houseplant is to just quit watering it, no fancy tricks needed, but it pisses a lot of people off to break it down as such
