Refuse Environmental Inactivism
I have been noticing over the past year or so a worrying talking point in my circles that has come to a head in the past few months of climate-induced catastrophes. I call it an argument for “environmental inactivism:” intentionally refusing to live more sustainably and consider one’s personal resource usage, but purportedly doing so because one cares about the environment. This argument is misguided, for a few reasons.
“The Argument” for environmental inactivism goes: corporations enjoy polluting and not needing to clean up after themselves or internalize the costs of their pollution. So, they created concepts like “carbon footprints” to make people self-flagellate over their own environmental transgressions and ignore or completely absolve the corporations while they continue to suck the planet dry. Therefore, the very idea that individuals have any responsibility to change anything about their behavior to make their lifestyles more environmentally sustainable is capitalist propaganda, and so the True Leftist Environmentalists among us will shun all individual measures to lower their carbon and other resource footprints and focus entirely on the only real threat, global fossil capitalism. Anyone telling you that you should care about or take steps to limit your own carbon footprint is at best a useful idiot for the fossil fuel industry, and at worst, their willing ally.
Where to begin?
The obvious problem with the Argument is that it is a false dichotomy: of course you can (and indeed must) do both. I assure you that my lack of beef and pork consumption and my purchasing of offsets for the carbon emissions of my electricity usage (among other lifestyle changes I’ve made) are not taking a second of my day away from advocating for “radical,” command-and-control, let’s-get-this-done-or-we-wont-live-long-enough-to-fight-about-it style climate action. It’s not causing me to sing the praises of Exxon or BP, and not making me the least bit complacent or making me think that “it’ll all work out because I don’t eat beef.” I am still fundamentally doubtful humanity as we know it will make it to the end of the century. Climate change is the biggest threat our species has ever faced, and we’re making almost no meaningful strides to even begin to address it. I still believe the biggest and best thing we can do to address it is to earnestly and immediately begin dismantling our global fossil fuel industry as quickly as humanly possible, and I continue to advocate for that (see, I’m doing it now!) But, if for whatever reason we can’t accomplish that by yesterday, I am going to do everything in my power to limit my contribution to the problem, and I urge everyone else to join me to whatever extent they can.
Of course, the Argument doesn’t come out of nowhere. It is true that the idea of a carbon footprint, while not created by the fossil fuel industry, was promoted and popularized by them (particularly BP) in the early 2000s. But we’re missing historical context. In the years leading up to and following the the Kyoto Protocol, and while climate change (then called global warming) was becoming a household term, fossil fuel companies desperately sought to paint themselves as environmentally conscious and on top of the problem, part of an overarching tactic by polluters called greenwashing. They still do it: oil companies still love to tout their investments in renewable energy. They still love to talk about money they devote to developing cutting edge biofuels, and the like.
And . . . they still invite us to calculate our own carbon footprint.
The Argument considers these accurate facts but draws overzealous conclusions from them. Telling us that they invested a relatively small amount of money in renewable energy is good for the fossil fuel industry, if it makes us think they’ve cleaned up their act and have made meaningful strides to address climate change. But renewable energy itself is not “an op” just because fossil fuel execs are invoking it to greenwash their industry. Telling us about new biofuels being developed by Shell is good for the fossil fuel industry, if it gets us to let them off the hook. But biofuels are not “an op” just because Shell is trying to use them as a rhetorical tool. In the same vein, telling us to consider our carbon footprint is good for oil companies, if it can persuade us to absolve them for climate change. But carbon footprints and individual sustainability changes are not “an op” just because fossil fuel interests are using them as a rhetorical tool.
The ads are an op. The ideas advertised in them are not. Therefore, just as we don’t need to shun the idea of renewable energy as a solution simply because a fossil fuel company said renewable energy is good in an ad campaign, we don’t need to rebuke the idea of individual sustainability because a fossil fuel company said it was a good idea in an ad campaign. As long as we don’t laser-focus on our own roles while forgetting the role of Big Oil in actively sabotaging sustainability efforts around the world and greenwashing heinous, irresponsible, and unsustainable operations, as long as we remember both, we’re still being good environmentalists.
Apart from this false dichotomy, the deeper issue is that the Argument fundamentally misunderstands what pollution is, where it comes from, and (ironically, given that I see these takes mostly from self-styled communists) the power of collective action. Most importantly, it fails to understand that our individual contributions to climate change directly impact corporate contributions to climate change.
First, corporations don’t produce carbon pollution (or any pollution) for the fun of it. There is no “OMNICORP CARBON DIOXIDE FACTORY” piling up coal in a big pit and setting it on fire just to watch it burn while a man in a top hat twirls his moustache and cackles maniacally as the flames dance in his monocle. Carbon dioxide and other greenhouse gases are primarily emitted by power generation, agriculture, and other businesses that are only in business because their goods and services are in demand, i.e. because individuals want to buy or use them. Take a look at that viral list of the “100 Corporations Responsible for Climate Change” and you will see that they are almost all (if not all) fossil fuel companies. In this context, “100 Corporations Responsible for Climate Change” essentially boils down to “humanity’s use of fossil fuels is responsible for climate change,” which, uh . . . shouldn’t be news to anyone reading this. Sure, 100 Corporations are producing 71% of the emissions. Why? To create energy. Why do they create energy? Because their customers demand it. Who are their customers? Other corporations and individuals.
Proponents of the Argument would likely retort “Aha! ‘other corporations!’ I bet they make up the lion’s share of energy use, don’t they?” They certainly do — in 2019, for example, residential electricity was only 16% of electricity use in the US. But it begs the question, “why do those other corporations use energy?” It may surprise you to learn that they are not buying energy for the sheer joy of watching the numbers on their meters go up and knowing that they are helping to shorten the lifespan of the human species on this planet. Once again, they are using energy to provide goods and services to their customers, and once again, those customers are corporations or individuals. And their corporate customers are buying from them to help them provide goods and services to other corporations or individuals. And theirs. And theirs. And theirs. And theirs. At the end of the day, corporations don’t need goods or services, because they don’t actually exist. The entire global economy is servicing the needs and wants of individual consumers. Individual consumers are the top of the economic food chain.
Through this lens, the importance of individual consumer choice is clear. When you as an individual consumer make the choice to stop eating beef, for example, you are limiting total demand for beef. Crucially, your lack of demand for beef is not just about your demand, but the demand for beef of the corporation you bought the beef from. Your butcher or grocery store or trendy food delivery program sold that much less beef this week, and long-term will order that much less beef from its suppliers, and so on, back to the farm itself. When you make the choice to ride a bike or walk to one local store or friend’s house instead of driving, you are limiting total demand for gasoline. It takes you that much longer to go to your local gas station to fill up, and takes that much longer for your local gas station to need to order more gasoline from its suppliers, and on and on back to the refinery and the drill. And that’s not all, because we need to think about the whole economy: when the grocery store orders that much less beef, there is that much less demand for packaging for that beef. That much less demand for energy to refrigerate that beef. That much less demand for fuel to transport that beef. That much less demand for energy to run the slaughterhouse that killed the cow that beef came from. And those decreases in demand echo back to the producer. In this global web of commerce, your small choices ripple outwards.
A question you may be asking yourself is: “okay, so maybe the demand for beef goes down by however much I ate before. That’s what, a few hamburgers’ worth of beef every month? Maybe the demand for gas goes down by however much I was using to go to the store. That’s what, ten gallons a year? How is that solving climate change?”
This is where the collective action bit comes in. It is true that you, as an individual consumer, are contributing a negligible amount to climate change as far as your percentage of the problem. Less than a rounding error. But a desert is made of grains of sand. If you are the only one on the planet taking any action to limit your individual contributions to climate change, yes, the demand for beef will go down by a few hamburgers per month, demand for gas by ten gallons per year. That would accomplish entirely nothing and help no one. But what if everyone in your neighborhood did that? What if everyone in your city, in your state, in your country did that? Three hamburgers a month isn’t much, but a billion hamburgers per month is. Ten gallons per year isn’t much, but three billion gallons per year is. And that’s just the easy stuff! The more you do, and the more of us do something, the greater that multiplier effect is.
So in sum, please, please, please, please, please keep thinking about your own resource footprint (including carbon) and what changes you can make to limit or mitigate it. Inactivism will not meet this challenge. I promise you can still advocate for the demise of fossil capitalism while bringing reusable bags to the store and having meatless Mondays at home. Contributing as much as you individually can to combating society’s ills is the essence of what collectivism is supposed to be about. It is the very definition of “from each according to his ability . . . .”
We all have a responsibility to limit our contribution to the problem and to help dismantle the system that created it. These responsibilities are not in tension, they are complementary.
