I love that analogy. No, you’re not going to personally save the world by reducing your carbon footprint. But you know what you are going to be? One leaf on a tree in a forest, making that little bit more oxygen that helps collectively make the world a better place.
And that’s worth doing. Especially if you can encourage other people to be leaves too.
Are plastic recycling and “what’s your carbon footprint?” scams to shift blame away from Big Oil? Yes.
Should you try to recycle and reduce your carbon footprint anyway, despite that? Also yes!
I’d argue that the concept of a carbon footprint is not, inherently, a scam. You do have an impact on the world. Your carbon footprint is a real and genuine measure of that impact. And taking actions to reduce your carbon footprint is a way to mindfully track, measure, and reduce that impact.
Oil company propagandists may have used this real thing - your carbon footprint - to shift blame away from the oil companies and redirect people’s efforts to reducing individual consumption instead of working for political change. Which is bad. But the carbon footprint, itself, is not a scam - just the uses to which big oil put it.
Plastic recycling, on the other hand, is fake industry propaganda from start to finish.
And honestly, if I’m on my soapbox, I’ll remind everybody that “reduce, reuse, recycle” is in order of preference. Recyclable paper bags may be better for the environment than single use plastic bags, but bringing your own reusable cloth bag to the grocery store is even better. Just because a single-use product is recyclable doesn’t make it environmentally friendly.
British Petroleum, the second largest non-state owned oil company in the world, with 18,700 gas and service stations worldwide, hired the public relations professionals Ogilvy & Mather to promote the slant that climate change is not the fault of an oil giant, but that of individuals. It’s here that British Petroleum, or BP, first promoted and soon successfully popularized the term “carbon footprint” in the early aughts. The company unveiled its “carbon footprint calculator” in 2004 so one could assess how their normal daily life – going to work, buying food, and (gasp) traveling – is largely responsible for heating the globe.
The term would literally not exist in the public consciousness were it not for BP using it to shift blame. But yes, the concept itself is valid.
It might’ve been invented by Big Oil, but if you keep giving money to Big Oil to buy fossil fuel you’re at least partially responsible for the carbon emissions released by burning that fuel.
People have trouble with the concept of partial blame, they want to feel innocent. Black and white thinking, low-resolution ethics.
It’s a necessary suppression to underpin individualist ideologies, I think.
Nevertheless, remember that the ‘footprint’ decisions of one oil exec outweigh the decisions of thousands or millions (or billions if you include descendants) of ordinary folk. But we do also outnumber them to that extent, so we have adequate power collectively.
People always take private jets as an example. And while they are very polluting, air traffic is only responsible for 2-3 % of all CO2 emissions. Transportation in general is responsible for almost a quarter of all emissions, and almost half of that is just regular cars, road freight is a third and the rest is aviation and shipping. So all the passenger cars are responsible for around 12.5 % of all emissions. That’s mostly just people going to work or grocery shopping.
We, well those of us in environmental activist roles anyway, were using the term regularly and as part of our public messaging in the mid-90’s.
Bill Rees came up with the term at UBC a few years earlier and it was catching fire, but environmentalism is poorly funded so the messages spread slowly. Oil companies saw a grift opportunity and used it as a deflection strategy a few years later. They just got there first, and by throwing gobs of marketing money at it, controlled the narrative.
The message was getting out, but not at hypercapitalist rates. BP oiligarchs don’t deserve credit for popularizing the term. Rees does, he did more than just coin it, he worked with us to make sure we built tools to understand it.
While true in theory, you only have so much effort to give. The capitalist/bureaucratic system is designed to exhaust us, to make free time feel like a waste so we have no time to reconsider our economic position and restructure our lives to benefit each other. Avoiding capitalist middlemen that can upcharge us and shape our cultural/material reality into something that gets us to contribute to the current oppressive structure.
The propaganda-cultivated sense of moral obligation to laboriously do some tiny individualist good by reducing your carbon footprint through consumer choice is meant to exhaust you and distract you. It doesn’t just shift blame, it expends your willingness to put effort into saving the planet in a way that doesn’t harm BP’s bottom line.
There are so many ways to benefit the planet that benefit you: saving money eating delicious vegan meals at a community kitchen (prepared with care by some of the best cooks in your community), getting access to better quality tools and appliances because your community has a well-stocked tool library and you can just borrow what you need for a fraction of the cost, decreasing medical waste by unionizing/protesting/rioting/revolting until you get high quality preventative healthcare, building/rebuilding neighborhoods to be walkable with high quality public transit to increase your physical and emotional wellbeing while decreasing emissions, or countless other options.
Something I tend to think about with regards to this sentiment is how much the individual action reflects the culture its embedded in. Despite everything, the attitude at large still seems to be that humans are entitled to their environment and it is theirs to use, the ecological manifest destiny exported by the West. Even if an individual reducing their footprint never amounts to anything, there’s a bit of an as above so below thing going on, and therefore this attitude will never be able to be excised if everyone is encouraged to just throw their hands up and declare, Well I’m totally powerless in the face of capital! Guess I’ll just keeping making a mess.
Thank you. This is what I scrolled through all the shit news to read today.
For those who read this and aren’t sure what to do, living vegan and planting fruit trees are very effective steps toward uprooting the capitalist system that’s wreaking havoc in the world.
Or if you don’t have land, set up a community network for borrowing appliances and gifting stuff people are no longer using.
Or all of the above.
I feel we need inverse buddhism: instead of “compassion to the world”, which required a huge imagination effort in the times of Buddha, we are now overflowed with the vision of the world’s suffering and we need re-align our compassion with the other fields that matter: the portion of the world we can act upon and that can act upon us.
You are not going to stop the bombs that are right now flying towards people. But you are going to receive the news of the suffering they cause, and if you are even slightly empathic, you will feel the pain of the people these bomb will make grieve.
What matters is that you can make good where you are. Don’t be ignorant of the world’s pain, but protect yourself.
The world just grew its nervous system and it fires its pain receptors like crazy. Do what you need to stay sane.
As much as possible I chose to be a part of the solution rather than a part of the problem.
Most modern day problems are mainly systemic, which is why I ALSO end up involved in Politics in most countries I live in.
“Don’t be part of the problem” isn’t a solution for systemic problems, it’s just living according to one’s principles but won’t actually shift the entire system in any meaningful way unless one is a billionaire or a famous personality.
One snowflake doesn’t make an avalanche, but if enough snowflakes fall, the mountainside is wiped away.
That’s all well and good, but relying on individual action to solve systemic problems still doesn’t work. Systemic problems require system-level solutions. We didn’t get rid of the hole in the ozon layer because everyone individually did their part; we got there through regulations, laws, and action on the level of governments.
You’re correct, but your analysis is incomplete.
It took global, coordinated, governmental action to ban CFCs worldwide.
But governments were motivated to ban CFCs because so many individual people, ordinary citizens and voters, learned that CFCs were destroying the ozone layer. Those individuals called on their governments to act. They funded the NGOs that studied and lobbied and suggested alternatives to CFCs. And they bought those alternatives instead of using CFCs themselves, which helped build the consensus to eliminate CFCs.
And individual action was part of building that consensus. Individual people, spreading awareness about the damage CFCs did, and choosing alternatives to CFCs in their own individual purchases, helped build consensus for system-level change.
Here’s a couple thought experiments. A new train or bus line is a system-level solution to improving public transit. So is a bike lane. But what individuals are more likely to vote for a new train line? People who drive to work, or people who rely on public transit? Who’s more likely to support a new bike lane, people who drive or people who bicycle?
Factory farming of animals is one of the greatest atrocities in modern society. But it provides cheap meat. Who’s more likely to support the system-level change necessary to ban factory farming? Someone who eats meat or someone who doesn’t? Someone who eats meat everyday or someone who eats meat once a week? Someone who knows how to cook without meat, or someone who doesn’t know how to cook without it?
And who’s going to be more passionate about banning factory farming - someone who consumes the products of factory farming daily and is necessarily going to feel conflicted about it? Or someone who has already rejected those products, in their own life, through individual action, and who will not lose anything in their own life if every feedlot and slaughterhouse is shut down?
Systemic change transforms the individual actions of entire communities. But it also works the other way around. Individual action builds consensus for systemic change. And we need to encourage and celebrate both.
That’s completely fair. Individuals did do a lot to change governments minds for the ozone layer. However, there are a lot of people who think that buying into oil companies’ propaganda and recycling or driving electric cars or whatever is the way to drive such systemic change, sadly. Instead of course (as the oil companies intended), all it does is make people feel good about themselves so they’re not motivated to do anything to actually solve the problem.
It happened because we pushed the limits and world leaders were more competent.
No, please don’t construct the illusion of some “past golden age”. Leaders were not more competent in the past.
It’s not that I can’t do anything, I do all I can
It’s that one dickhead billionaire asshole ruins all the good intentions of millions.
Why try to get more millions when we should go after those ones…
This exactly. It’s a room full of people wiping the floor with single tissue papers while one guy is spraying the floor with a fire hose. But hey, at least they get to feel good about themselves because they can tell themselves “I did my part”. What else could they do?
Overall, I just try to be better than average for people in my area. If everyone did that, we’d keep moving the average to a better point. I don’t need to completely upend my life for ultimately negligible impact, but I refuse to be the problem.
A principled stance would be to do what ever you feel helps but also understand that as one we are weak, collectively we are strong, then we need to find the most effective way to crush capitalism as a collective.
I would champion mutual aid, this has changed over the years. wouldn’t we as a collective do better in funnelling our resources towards building cadre’s capable of leading a revolution? Rather than knitting clubs leading soup kitchens?
I don’t believe that we can’t bring about change.
Human beings has a change force.
We sow seeds that will bloom with time. Some growlings will need less time, and others will need more time. Especially bigger change will need more time, but as long as we are patient, and give proper care, the growling will bloom.
We bring about change in ourselves through bloom. We water our inner growlings. Water our expression, our meaning, our connections. Our lids are removed from our heads, and we bloom.
We luminate our bloom upon others. Our inner warmth is radiating upon others through all of our communicative channels, our bodylanguage, our facial expressions, our language.
We wave our beings through society and through the world. This is primarily done through poetic resonance.
But although I have emphasized how these can change society for the better, they can also change society for the worse, so we need to be use our changeforce wisely.
