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For World Environment Day, Ed Goodman takes a critical look at the climate crisis and argues that marginal changes aren’t going to do the trick.
As a bold 11-year-old, I went vegetarian for two weeks. I was inspired by my teacher during a Geography lesson where we used an algorithm to calculate our carbon footprints. My 11-year-old analysis was rather pessimistic: owning two cars is two too many, leaving your lights on is sacrilege, and eating Mum’s spaghetti Bolognese is comparable to pulling teeth from Mother Earth herself. I genuinely believed that this is what I had to do to limit global warming to 1.5ºC.
This was the first time that I had felt climate guilt. That there was something more that I could be, or should be, doing to reduce or mitigate my personal impact on the environment. Climate guilt has become universalised within our generation, to the extent that we hold one another morally accountable for our sustainable decisions. We justify spending $13 to eat an acai bowl with sustainable bamboo spoons, whilst sipping on oat-milk lattes (because almond milk uses far too much water) through reusable straws. All whilst we wear second-hand clothes from Glebe markets that we paid far too much for and sign every relevant petition that has its moment of glory on Instagram stories and Facebook feeds. But climate guilt isn’t necessarily a bad thing, it merely needs to be targeted more effectively by the mainstream.
The importance of environmental awareness has taken precedence in recent decades. However, it has been accompanied by a sort of victim-blaming in the mainstream whereby the onus of environmental degradation has been shifted from primary perpetrators with the capacity to enact meaningful change, to individuals who eat red meat and have five-minute showers. This victim-blaming has created a ‘band-aid solution’ that acts as a double-edged sword. On one hand, environmentally conscious individuals can exonerate their climate guilt with acai bowls and e-waste collections, whilst on the other, individuals are left to dwell in guilt and in doing so, ignore the sustainability movement altogether. Whilst society is distracted with debating about McDonalds introducing paper straws and how they simply cannot maintain their structural integrity in a frozen coke, 100 companies are continuing to produce 71% of global emissions, causing irreparable damage to the environment everyday.
This is not to delegitimise the efforts of those who do make significant changes to their lifestyles to be more sustainable, which is unequivocally a good thing. I am claiming that this is merely not enough to resolve the climate crisis for two reasons.
First, individual change is statistically negligible without collective effort. Much to my frustration, my decision to forgo eating meat for two weeks in 2012 did not shift the global supply change to ensure that one less cow or chicken was slaughtered, and my carbon footprint is statistically incomparable to that of Chevron, BP, the British Coal Corporation or BHP Billiton. However, when society collectively takes steps towards sustainability, substantive change can be effected. Evidently, the growth of environmental awareness over the last two decades has decreased the consumption of red meat significantly, as beef consumption has dropped 41% since 2000 and the amount of sheep meat consumed by Australians has decreased 50% since 2000. Most notably, the various COVID-19 lockdowns saw the amount of flights halved, road traffic fell almost 70%, and industrial emissions in China dropped approximately 18%. This prompted environmental healing as dolphins returned to the Venetian canals, and the peaks of Mt. Everest were visible from Kathmandu once again. However, even with these efforts, the environmental benefit is marginal relative to the constant degradation at the hands of large corporations. Further, mobilising collective society to engage with sustainability efforts is a difficult feat and rarely observable, rather we need alternative measures.
Second, we must be reminded that the burden rests on governments and corporations and our only responsibility, as individuals, is to push them to engage with meaningful change. The narrative that individuals are responsible for the destruction of the environment has been extremely convenient for the companies and corporations who have contributed significantly to the rise in global mean surface temperatures since the end of the Industrial Revolution. Governments have the capacity to regulate industries and ensure that corporations adhere to environmental sustainability standards, they have the capacity to subsidise renewable energy sources, they have the capacity to provide funding for environmental research, and they have the capacity to create meaningful change that the single individual simply cannot. Importantly, the only responsibility that individuals have is to lobby the government and support policies which prioritise environmental recovery, regulation, and achieving the necessary targets to maintain global warming below 1.5º.
This is not to say that individuals are exonerated from all climate guilt. We all have a role to play, and individuals should do all that they can to change their lifestyle where possible. Although these aforementioned contributions are marginal, they can still be an effective step when approached collectively. However, failing to complete these lifestyle changes should not be seen as morally incorrect, nor should time be wasted debating the moral legitimacy of marginal contributions such as two-minute showers, veganism or acai bowls. Rather, our individual and collective attention should be focused on the primary perpetrators of global warming and the actors who have the capacity to enact adequate environmental regulation.
Seven years after my brief encounter with vegetarianism, I stand in Sydney’s CBD. I’m still as enthusiastic for a bowl of spaghetti Bolognese, I drive a car, and occasionally, I forget to flick my desk-lamp off when I go to have my longer-than-two-minute shower. This time I’m surrounded by green shirts, picket signs, and hundreds of thousands of students who were missing lessons to attend a ‘School Strike 4 Climate’ protest. Scott Morrison had just confirmed that he would not be attending the 2019 United Nations Emergency Climate Summit in New York alongside Donald Trump. Our protest carried through the streets of Sydney’s CBD and our signs called into question our government, our corporations, and ourselves in the fight for sustainability. We must hold those with the capacity to enact meaningful change accountable.
It’s not a series of marginal changes that’s going to fix this problem. Not in the slightest. It’s time to push those accountable to make actual change on this issue. This is what we have to do to limit global warming to 1.5ºC.
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