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Recycle your trash. Turn off the lights when you leave home. Don’t eat meat. Think before flying. Don’t drive an SUV. Bike to work.
It’s a common refrain from many climate campaigners: We carry the fate of the planet in our hands.
But while it’s true that the wheels of the economy are dictated by consumer choices, some activists argue that the real decision-makers when it comes to addressing global warming are corporations and governments.
In his book “Een beter milieu begint niet bij jezelf” or “A better environment doesn’t start with yourself,” the Dutch journalist Jaap Tielbeke writes that real change starts with politics: “Not with buying a Tesla, but when investing in public transport. Not with becoming a vegan, but with the elimination of intensive livestock farming.”
There are numbers to back up the idea that it’s the big players that really matter. A 2017 study by the Climate Accountability Institute found that 71 percent of the world’s greenhouse gas emissions since 1988 could be traced to just 100 fossil fuel companies, many of them state-owned.
Richard Heede, the author of the study, said fossil fuel companies are “at the nexus of deciding how much carbon fuels are delivered to consumers worldwide.”
Joint effort
That doesn’t mean, however, that individuals are off the hook, according to Heede. The study found that roughly 90 percent of the greenhouse gases produced by those 100 companies are the result of burning fuel for energy — and that does mean that cutting back on things like driving or flying matters.
“It’s the consumers that actually burn and demand the fossil fuels that these companies provide,” said Heede. He said that where companies bear most responsibility is for actions like lobbying against emissions cuts or in favor of subsidies for polluting industries.
In order to hit the European Commission’s target of cutting emissions by 55 percent by 2030, both companies and people have to step up, said Kimberly Nicholas, associate professor of sustainability science at Sweden’s Lund University Center for Sustainability Studies.
Nicholas co-authored a study that ranked 148 individual actions on climate change according to their impact. It found that having fewer children is the best way to reduce a person’s contribution to climate change, followed by giving up cars and avoiding long-haul flights. Those do much more to cut greenhouse gas emissions than eating a plant-based diet, recycling or switching from plastic to canvas bags.
“We need a drastic system change,” said Nicholas, and most of that has to happen among the world’s wealthiest people. “The top 1 percent of households emit 22 times the per capita climate targets, while only 5 percent of households live within the targets at the moment,” she said.
Personal influence
Another way that individual actions can have an effect is that in many cases, they turn out to be contagious. The behavior of a single person may not bend the curve on climate change, but setting an example of cleaner living can have a bigger impact if others follow.
Google’s Project Sunroof website allows people to see who has solar panels in a given neighborhood (it only works in the U.S. for now). It shows that panels are not randomly distributed but appear in clusters.
“There’s enough evidence that shows that good behavior spreads,” said Nicholas.
Even more effective is using voting and direct pressure to get governments and companies to change policies, Heede and Nicholas said.
“Relying on individual capacity to reduce will not suffice, you need to vote appropriately and help run the companies we work for,” said Heede.
