Do We Matter in the Fight Against Climate Change?

By Jonathan Hui |

Try taking a word from the English dictionary and repeat it a dozen times. Have you done it? Well, if you have, you’ll soon realize that the word starts to sound hazy and strange; it loses its meaning and turns into nothing more than a meaningless amalgamation of syllables. Semantic satiation is the psychological term which describes this phenomenon, and climate change is the two words that we are becoming desensitized to. Everyday, it seems like we are crossing a new record, a new threshold, some point of no return. Despite climate change being one of the most pressing issues of our time, the cacophony of doom from the media has led people to cope with the issue through two ways; We either deny the problem by convincing ourselves that we won’t be as affected as others. Or, we simply spiral down into hopelessness and label climate change as an unfixable and unconquerable problem. Unfortunately, it is true the system we live in does perpetuate environmental harm, and it does make it difficult to curb our environmental impact in our dayto-day lives; companies that label themselves as “green” for the sake of marketing without any change for the better, and the capitalist strive for economic growth and consumption all inflict soon-to-be irreversible harms for our planet. But instead of going on a long-winded rant about why climate change is important and delving into statistics of doom and gloom we are wellversed in, I feel it is paramount to discuss individual change — Why we, as. individuals, can’t really change anything, why we should try to change anyways, and why our current style of climate change messaging is just not working.

Carbon Footprint

Carbon footprint. Although the term signifies nothing nefarious and seems almost even noble in its cause, the term itself was actually popularized by oil giant BP. It is a fact that BP popularized the term in an ingenious ad campaign to shift environmental blame from large oil companies to the general public. "This is one of the most successful, deceptive PR campaigns ever," said Benjamin Franta, who researches law and history of science as a J.D.-Ph.D. student at Stanford Law School.

The notion of carbon footprint seems reasonable at first. After all, we (as consumers) do cause pollution by eating meat, or driving a gasolinepowered car. But the problem is that it's physically impossible for you to reduce your carbon footprint to even double the global average. Built into your carbon footprint are all sorts of things you have no control over, such as highways and bridges, ramps, military, and other public services. The majority of your carbon footprint consists of fossil fuels burned on your behalf. The best example showcasing just how little we can do came a few years ago, when the worst pandemic in a century hit. Many of us were forced into quarantine, unable to go out, drive to work, or fly on planes. Despite this, carbon dioxide emissions only fell by 6.4%, a far cry from what is needed to bring notable change.

Another piece of evidence is when MIT researchers calculated the carbon footprint of a homeless person without a car, home, or job. The ”homeless person who ate in soup kitchens and slept in homeless shelters" still indirectly emitted 8.5 tons of carbon dioxide in one year. "Even a homeless person living in a fossil fuel-powered society has an unsustainably high carbon footprint," said Stanford's Benjamin Franta. "As long as fossil fuels are the basis for the energy system, you could never have a sustainable carbon footprint. You simply can't do it." One of the reasons this ad campaign is so brilliant is because it's partly true, oil companies manufacture the oil, and we do consume it. But in order to get anything done, BP and other fossil fuel companies have to admit some real culpability and make genuine moves to reduce their massive carbon footprint. The point is to blame the consumer as much as possible, knowing that the consumer cannot control the situation and ensuring that nothing changes.

What’s even more outrageous is that BP regularly lobbies against regulations that would force them to make fuel cleaner. They claim they want a carbon tax, yet they spend millions making sure the carbon tax gets shot down. They've conspired with other fossil fuel companies to slow down electric cars and more fuel-e cient modes of transportation. It leads us to the inescapable conclusion that we, as consumers, are not free to choose between fossil fuels and a cleaner alternative because fossil fuel companies have rigged the system.

We have become too xated on our own actions that we've forgotten who the big players are: the people who are producing the oil and actively creating propaganda to guilt trip people and create more public confusion. We can’t just keep believing that personal action alone is able to do anything. So aside from reducing our own emissions and waste, something more in uential that everyone could do is vote for leaders who have plans to slash fossil fuel emissions, invest in the development of electric vehicles, or mandate buildings to use less energy would make enormous contributions. Beyond that, the public must also pressure governments and politicians to take action on the big fossil fuel companies -- whether that means going to rallies or calling for action online.

What do I do now?

This may sound contradictory, but, despite what I’ve just told you, I still believe that we should strive to take individual action. Chances are, you’ve probably heard of the carbon footprint campaign before. But we must be careful not to use the powerlessness of individual action as an excuse to abstain from doing the right things for the environment. The problem is, when we use “individual change is useless” as an excuse and adopt this mindset, we risk an overcorrection for the carbon footprint problem. Yes, it is true that individual change is (for the most part) insigni cant, but pitting personal action against collective action in a zero-sum game is unhelpful. Because the fact is, the climate movement needs both political lobbying and individual action for real change to take place.

It’s di cult to nd a balance between political and individual action. While one’s time would be better spent advocating for renewable energy rather than, say, planting a tree, it is also indispensable for us to at least make an attempt to align our actions with our role as public citizens. When you make the choice to take public transport or avoid eating meat, you are making a statement that your actions matter, and that it’s not too late to avoid climate catastrophe. Climate activist Naomi Klein has said “The very idea that we, as atomized warming and were reported to be less likely to take action on their carbon footprint.

One conclusion for why this is the case is that, with any stimulus, individuals are likely to become desensitized to them through long term exposure; The public has a limited pool of worry, especially when confronted with more instability, uncertainty, and threats in our world today. This means that when people hear a lot about the problem but are led to believe that they are inconsequential and unable to change things, they will try to cope psychologically through selfdenial or detachment from the issue, leading to a surge in hopelessness. Additionally, Feinberg and Willer from UC state that “because dire messaging regarding global warming is at odds with the strongly established cognition that the world is fair and stable, people may dismiss the factual content of messages that emphasize global warming’s dire consequences. But if the same messages are delivered coupled with a potential solution, it allows the information to be communicated without creating substantial threat to these individuals’ deeply held beliefs.”

Knowing this, it seems like we should be shifting away from communicating about the problem and more about the solutions and hopeful messages. However, this doesn’t mean that we should replace doomerism with baseless optimism. Because, the truth is that climate change is still placing our entire world in an increasingly dire situation that gets worse day-byday, and the worst part is, we won’t even be the ones who are most a ected by this change. In fact, the richest 1% of the world’s population are responsible for more emissions than the poorest 50%. Yet, the poor will still be most a ected by the detrimental impacts of climate change; Farmlands turning into deserts, sea level rises threatening homes. These things can really happen anywhere, but the poorer countries are just not equipped with the resources to adequately deal with these crises. So for me, knowing this just lls me with a feeling of indignation for these people, and I can’t help but question why any of us think that we are above our responsibility to change our lives for the better. Not only for ourselves, but for the betterment of our world.

I hope that this article has planted a sprout with new insights in your head. The point is not to convince you to believe everything I’ve written, but just to provide one more viewpoint that you’ve hopefully found helpful.