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Editor’s note: For years, the St. Petersburg Conference on World Affairs has brought together diplomats, journalists and academic experts to discuss key international issues. This year’s edition is planned as an in-person and live-stream “hybrid” event. It will take place from Tuesday through Friday. It is free to attend, but you must sign up. worldaffairsconference.org. This column was written and edited by a conference participant.
Like millions of people, I instinctively grab my cloth shopping bag when I go to the grocery shop. I turn the lights off as soon as I leave the room. I buy locally sourced food, and I’ve even been given to using a metal drinking straw to avoid the plastic ones that apparently harm sea turtles (and the paper ones that are useless for drinking a beverage).
I get a little doing-my-part dopamine surge — before I remember that I’m buying into the global gaslighting campaign to shift blame from the true polluters to individuals.
It drives me crazy every time.
It’s not that these actions are burdensome — those canvas bags can haul a lot of groceries — but I know that they feed into a dangerous lie that’s standing in the way of addressing the catastrophic climate crisis that’s already arriving in Florida and around the world. Despite what the feel-good ads and well-intentioned tips for green living might have us believe, there’s simply no way that individual actions are going to avert apocalyptic global warming.
![Libby Liu](data:image/svg+xml,%3Csvg xmlns="http://www.w3.org/2000/svg" viewBox="0 0 2938 2204"/%3E "Libby Liu")
The idea of each doing our part makes us feel empowered and gives us someone to blame. This is what disposable plastic water bottles are for!
But the argument that we’re going to ease this problem through individual responsibility doesn’t add up. It also lets some of the most reckless or irresponsible actors off-the-hook.
For example, in 2019, a single oil company, Shell was responsible for emitting1.65 billion tons carbon. That same year, the company’s CEO, Ben van Beurden,His driver was publicly chastised for buying strawberries in January.. It is a crime to eat fruit out of season.
The truth is that it’s the actions of van Beurden, not his ill-treated chauffeur, that are driving us off the climate cliff.
Not only oil companies are worthy of our attention, but so is everyone else. There are many culpability and complicity that can be found in almost every sector. For example, the financial services industry has a legal responsibility for conducting risk assessments for financing energy projects. This includes projects with a large carbon footprint. Yet they routinely ignore climate impacts — and climate risks — in order to make a profit.
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Advertising and marketing firms serving big polluters, too, are aware of the scale of the crisis, yet they use their efforts to direct our attention away from massively dangerous systems and toward the role “you” can play in shrinking your carbon footprint. It wasn’t environmental activists but rather BP in collaboration with ad firm Ogilvy & Mather that gave a big boost to the term “carbon footprint” after the company released an individual “carbon calculator” in 2004.
Big Tech companies are not only preaching responsibility to their employees, but they are also enabling the polluters through technology to inflict more destruction. A Greenpeace’s 2020 report showed “… how the three largest cloud companies — Amazon (33% market share), Microsoft (18%) and Google (8%) — are partnering with oil companies to use artificial intelligence technologies to discover new oil and gas deposits to exploit.
How do we know that decisions were made to minimize corporate responsibility in the climate crisis? Because again and again courageous individuals across industries have spoken out about what they’ve seen to raise the alarm. Yet they’ve routinely been dismissed or, even worse, ignored entirely.
My complaint about the “up by the bootstraps” approach to tackling climate change isn’t to say that individuals don’t have a role to play. However, our collective role must be shared by using the power of our government to demand that corporations take responsibility for their actions. All industries take responsibility for their actions and for the crisis they’ve caused.
First and foremost, transparency is essential. The whistleblowers who witness wrongdoing shouldn’t have to choose between their career and their conscience. Regulators and lawmakers can’t address these issues if they don’t know what’s happening and we the public cannot convey our demands through public discourse if these secrets are left to fester in the dark, so robust legal protections for whistleblowers are a critical piece of any climate agenda.
Only then, can we collectively hold industries accountable for creating the climate crises and create clear, effective regulations to ensure our collective well-being, not short-term profit.
A village is needed to destroy a planet. It’s going to take a village to repair one, too.
Libby Liu is CEO of the Open Technology Fund. This fund is a global program for internet freedom that is part of Radio Free Asia. Her organization, which has a long history of success fighting and overcoming Internet censorship, since the advent of China’s Great Firewall, serves citizens around the world that governments deny access or censor content.
