I am 18 years old and have been hearing about my carbon footprint since before I understood what it meant. Climate change is often portrayed as my generation’s problem to fix, even though we didn’t start it. The more I come to understand the problem holistically, the more I realize previous generations did not start this problem, either. In fact, no one person created climate change.
It’s been reported that 100 companies emit around 70 percent of the world’s greenhouse gases. The rest of the world, including billionaires and their 20-minute flights, fit into the remaining 30 percent. Yet the current domineering narrative surrounding climate change seems to be that it’s on us, the 30 percent, to pull our weight and then some. Off-shore drilling is excusable, but using a plastic straw is not. Cobalt mining is permissible, but driving a car with bad gas mileage is borderline unforgivable. The government allows companies to install oil pipelines on ancient native burial grounds, but God forbid one person forgets to recycle.
This dynamic aggravates me: the finger-pointing blame-game, the public exhibits towards each other, while the real culprits do what they want and get away with it. In fact, they’re probably jumping for joy that we are blaming each other, since they are the inventors of this narrative to begin with. The very idea of a carbon footprint comes from a BP media campaign dating back to 2004. They encouraged us to look at climate change introspectively: to reconsider how long our showers are and how much meat we eat. They did this all in the hopes that while our guilt grew, we might miss the havoc and destruction they created with their drilling and oil spills.
These corporations would like you to believe that climate change is a crime we are all complicit in; that we all got in this mess together and must collectively find a way out. That’s where they’re wrong. Unlike other social issues, we didn’t get into this together, and it’s not up to us to fix it. And we already know what the solution is; it’s just not presently profitable for big corporations.
Like it or not, climate change is upon us. The lack of snow in the winter and the extreme once-in-a-lifetime weather events that happen multiple times a year are not premonitions of what’s to come– they are the effects of what has already happened. And if we don’t start teaching corporations the meaning of the word accountability, it will get worse. Climate change currently stands to displace two billion people due to rising sea levels, cause hundreds of thousands of deaths and cost the United States’ economy billions in the process. When the damages come to pass, who will be paying? Not the companies who caused it, to be sure. If they were paying for the climate damages they cause currently, it would cost them 44 percent of their total profits.
This raises the question, why aren’t they paying right now? In short, lobbying. Establishment politicians in our government have direct ties to and take money from the fossil fuel industry — Republicans and Democrats alike. Congress doesn’t pay their salaries; oil executives do. Therefore, it’s not in their interest to regulate the companies causing this damage, even though they are the ones in the position to effect the most change, since fossil fuel corporations have no incentive to stop what they’re doing otherwise.
When I hear politicians tell us to carpool more and fly less, I feel like it’s an affront to our intelligence. Truly fixing the problem entails real change: investing in safe and effective public transportation, shifting our national power grid to more sustainable energy, meeting our international climate goals and closing loopholes that allow American fossil fuel corporations to emit copious amounts of greenhouse gases with no consequence.
To be clear, I don’t think that living sustainably is pointless. Everyone must do their part to stop climate change. But everyone’s part in the solution should be proportional to their contribution to the problem. And the biggest changes must come from the top down, not the other way around.
Fiona McFarland can be reached at [email protected].
