This story was published in print in December 2023.
As global awareness of climate change has grown, the blame for its disastrous impacts has fallen disproportionately onto the shoulders of everyday citizens. Various products and media strategies aimed at helping consumers change their lifestyles to mitigate environmental damage have grown in popularity.
While government campaigns and major media outlets push a majority of the accountability for climate change onto the consumer, the largest culprits fly under the radar. Since 1988, just 100 corporate entities have accounted for 71% of global industrial emissions. International organizations, governments and major media outlets need to hold corporations accountable for their continued choice to prioritize profit over the environment’s health.
The expectation that individuals should measure or limit their personal contributions to global warming is a relatively new idea. In 2000, in partnership with advertising agency Ogilvy, British Petroleum created the concept of a “carbon footprint” — a measure of the total amount of greenhouse gasses a person emits in their daily life — using a multimillion-dollar advertising campaign to push the idea that individuals should work to reduce their own footprint. This metric of individual environmental harm perpetuates the idea that climate change is the fault of average consumers rather than large-scale companies, including BP itself.
Misleading media fuels the misconception that individual actions make the most substantial difference in combating global warming, with thousands of instructional guides appearing when someone Google searches “How can I stop climate change?” Articles recommend switching to renewable energy, reducing water waste, turning off lights, biking to work, using fewer single-use plastics and other behavioral modifications. These lifestyle changes are meaningful and beneficial to the environment, but the majority of these measures only work to appease the average person’s conscience and make no measurable impact.
One example of mass mobilizations that do little to change environmental circumstances is the plastic straw movement of the late 2010s. Nine-year-old activist Milo Cress created the “Be Straw Free” campaign in 2011 after noticing that restaurants gave customers a straw with every drink, even though the straws often went unused. Cress investigated straw waste, concluding that Americans used a total of 500 million straws every day. The project received an explosion of attention in 2015 when a video of a sea turtle getting a plastic straw painfully removed from its nose went viral, amassing over 86 million views. Believing they were “saving the turtles,” environmentally-conscious individuals began to demonize and reject the use of plastic straws. The movement gave people who opted against plastic straws the feeling that their actions were directly combatting a global issue.
However, these efforts failed to address many other, greater threats to marine life, including one of the most common and deadly ocean pollutants: fishing gear. According to the World Wildlife Fund, between 500,000 and one million tons of commercial fishing gear enter the ocean each year, with lost fishing nets and ropes making up approximately half of the Great Pacific Garbage Patch. Plastic straws, on the other hand, comprise approximately 1% of plastic waste in the ocean. Unfortunately, a feel-good story about how a nine-year-old boy worked to save sea creatures got more attention than the harsh reality: it is nearly impossible to eliminate single-use plastics in day-to-day life.
Misdirected activism efforts amplified by media outlets with ulterior motives are not just limited to content about reducing the impact of plastics. Web news sources fruitlessly emphasize energy conservation, specifically involving fossil fuels and carbon dioxide. Based on data compiled from top companies’ sustainability reports and government records, every 39.7 seconds, the 10 largest companies in the world use the same amount of electricity the average American consumes in their entire lifetime. In 2020, it took the top 10 corporate carbon dioxide emitters in the U.S. 0.726 seconds to expel the same amount of CO2 that the average U.S. citizen did during the whole year. No amount of carpooling, metal straw usage or turning off the lights can balance out that level of pollution.
For decades, corporations that have played a major role in the global rise in temperature have refused to take accountability for their actions, actively working to conceal their impact. Some such companies include car manufacturers Ford Motor Co. and General Motors, who conducted research aiming to prove that certain kinds of emissions were actually beneficial to the environment. Upon learning the opposite was true, executives worked to obscure the results of their investigation. The public only learned the truth when journalists uncovered and reported on these manufacturers, demonstrating the potential positive impact media groups can make in the fight against climate change.
The alternative to corporate cover-ups of emissions is just as malicious. Corporate “greenwashing” — the practice of marketing a company as more eco-friendly than it really is — only exacerbates the lack of accountability. By advertising themselves as “green” and “eco-conscious,” companies manipulate consumers into purchasing their products, profiting off people’s desire to aid the fight against climate change.
Amidst the constant battle with corporations working against the interests of the Earth, the United Nations held a Climate Change Conference in Dec. 2015, in which 196 Parties adopted the Paris Agreement, an international climate treaty that aimed to “limit the temperature increase to 1.5°C above pre-industrial levels.” While the agreement was a positive step, it lacks important features that can ensure countries are held accountable for their pledges and are making appropriate progress to meet them.
Additionally, only national governments committed to reducing greenhouse gas emissions, with little attempt to direct federal regulation toward the private companies most responsible for climate trends.
Society can make progress in addressing climate change if everyone is willing to make substantial changes in their life and consume in a way that economically incentivizes real climate consciousness. However, the probability of this kind of collective lifestyle change is practically nonexistent. Realistically, the only thing that aggressive environmental activism achieves is guilting concerned individuals into extreme action, failing to spur change on a large scale.
When people who consume media focus on and feel remorse about the impact of their actions, they end up missing the bigger picture of the organizations that make a massive impact. Instead of placing blame on the individual, requiring corporations to be transparent with their emissions and to sign agreements promising reduced output of greenhouse gasses will safeguard the planet for future generations.
