The Individual Carbon Footprint Scam: Denial of Real Accountability Run Wild
Post 3.2
In the preceding post in this series (#3.1) I discussed how individuals are responsible but not accountable when it comes to climate change. We are all responsible for joining together to overcome climate change by creating a just and prosperous sustainability that enhances wellbeing for everyone and everything. But as individuals we are not accountable for causing a systemic aggregate problem like climate change.
Valiant efforts by lone individuals to act on their own to reduce outcomes that are an inevitable byproduct of systems in which they are enmeshed, is, at the end of the day, delusional.
You can’t do it on your own. It’s crazy to think you can.
This is especially the case with climate pollution, given the speed and scale of change needed to overcome climate change.
Fossil fuels power our societies and economies, creating entrenched, powerful, vested interests bolstered by mammoth physical infrastructure systems and backed up by the political power of those who have helped to create and maintain and benefit from such systems.
Do you really think, enmeshed as you are in these very systems, that working on your own to reduce your own pollution is going to get the job done?
Well, every little bit helps, right?
Only if that little bit is part of a larger effort to change these systems. Even a bunch of individuals acting independently will never, ever, ever, ever, ever, ever, ever, ever, ever be enough at the speed and scale needed.
Why Have We Been Scammed?
So why have so many of us bought into the ubiquitous individual carbon footprint scam?
Three reasons:
our own guilt-laden egocentricity,
the deceptiveness of hyper-individualism, and
because Big Producers of Polluting Products promoted the carbon footprint to deflect attention away from themselves.
We are primed to buy the third’s bait-and-switch by the first two.
First, as children we lacked abstract thought, or the ability to think outside ourselves, as it were. In such an egocentric world, our centered-in-self world, everything that happens is related to you and even caused by you. That’s why children can feel guilt over outcomes they had absolutely nothing to do with — like a parent’s alcoholism.
Trouble is, when we develop abstract thought it doesn’t erase egocentricity; it exists in uneasy tension with it, and it takes a lifetime of effort and experience to see our place in the world for what it is — that we are a part of, but not the center of, the reality in which we live.
The individual carbon footprint scam taps right into our latent, guilt-producing egocentricity. The scam says “Take a good, long look in the mirror. It’s all about you and your bad behavior.”
The carbon footprint scam of the Big Producers of Polluting Products whispers in your ear: “Turns out this systemic, complex, multifaceted, entrenched problem isn’t any of those things after all. It’s really very simplistic. It’s all about you. You’re to blame. The solution? Change your personal behavior. We’ve even got a check list for you. Things aren’t getting better? Try harder.”
With climate, there’s only one place this leads: hope-stealing defeat and despair.
Second, the individual carbon footprint scam leans heavily into the unhelpful side of western individualism.
Let us recognize that individualism is needed when the group stifles human potential, when people aren’t free to become their true selves, when human rights are violated. Individualism is needed when collectivism becomes oppressive. Healthy individualism has contributed many positive things to the world.
But pushed to its extreme, hyper-individualism can become a cancer that destroys the body in which it lives.
In many versions of so-called “rugged individualism,” or hyper-individualism, childish egocentricity is confused with becoming one’s own self and a mature person in the world.
The opposite is the case. Refusing to grow out of childhood limitations ain’t maturity. For many who strut and bellow about individualism and personal freedom, it’s really a cover for selfish immaturity. A child’s centered-in-self reality becomes an adult’s self-centered delusional choice.
When you become an adult, it is time to put away childish things, such as seeing yourself as the center of the Universe. As a child you can’t help it. As an adult you can. You must.
In overcoming climate change by creating a just and prosperous sustainability that enhances wellbeing for everyone and everything we must put away childish hyper-individualism and strive to balance the individual and the group so that they work together for the benefit of all.
Third, we have been taken in by the individual carbon footprint scam because Big Producers — or BPs — wanted us to. It was a BP oil giant that popularized the individual carbon footprint with huge media campaign in 2004, introducing the first-ever carbon footprint calculator.
Amazingly, they called your carbon footprint “your mark on the world.” But don’t be discouraged, because this BP is doing their part, with a sunny tag line that also suggests realism: “It’s a start.” Except this BP’s behavior since tells a much different story, whose tag line should be, “It’s a joke.”
While not explicitly mentioning a carbon footprint, in 2007 another Big Oil giant had their own major media campaign that worked the same bait-and-switch. This one’s ads said they were all about clean innovation or “the power of ‘Human Energy.’” Every day they
try to find newer ways, smarter ways, cleaner ways to power the world. Humans have always reached for what seemed impossible. This is the power of “Human Energy” and will you join us?
Amazingly, Big Oil isn’t about oil after all! And just like the other Big Oil giant they’re asking us to join them! But what does it mean to join our individual human energy with theirs?
As you can see, here are the answers:
It’s all good, the climate crisis will be solved, if we just use less energy, get a programmable thermostat, and leave our car at home more, because this oil giant is joining us!
This is their version of us, a phantom us.
Both of these Big Oil giants want us to focus on our “bad” behavior; they want to telescope all efforts down to lone individuals ineffectually acting on their own, but with a promise that Big Oil is with us.
Well guess what? We’re done with this bogus individual-guilt con game!
It’s well past time to jilt the guilt and join the cause. Dump the individual carbon footprint scam and become a part of the greatest and most long lasting social change movement in the history of the world. We are not accountable, but we are responsible. We can’t do it on our own, but we can when we join together.
Together we are making the impossible possible and the possible actual and the actual beautiful and our future faster as we fulfill our Better Future Covenant. Together as Climate Action Artist-Athletes we are stopping bad stuff, setting wrong right, and making things better on all of our Olympian Fields of Action. Together we are becoming our destiny, who we are called to be. Join us!
If you are new here, check out our Intro Series, as well as other posts in this Hope & Justice Series. If you like this post, please “like,” comment and share. And thanks for all you’re doing.