Climate Change and Individual Responsibility
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Avram Hiller presents the counterpoint to my perspective, that individual action does actually matter significantly. However, I could not disagree more with the way he presents his facts and the focus of his article.
Early in the work he rhetorically asks that if small “individual actions such as Sunday drives are not causes of climate change, then what does cause climate change?” (Hiller). The answer is simple, big business. Other articles have shown that businesses are primarily to blame for climate change. This question is also loaded for multiple reasons. Calling Sunday drives a ‘cause’ of climate change is unfair, a ‘contribution’ is a far more accurate term. If Sunday drives existed in a vacuum, humankind’s change upon the climate would be incredibly miniscule, if not undetectable. Do these Sunday drives help the environment? Of course not, but the impact is so incredibly small that it seems unfair to label them as a ‘cause’. Aside from this, I cannot name a single person that I have ever met in my life that drives purely for fun. On the off chance that someone is not driving in order to reach a destination, they’re likely driving for practice. Sunday drives are, to my understanding, incredibly outdated, and in an article that dates from 2011, I assumed I’d come across more modern issues.
Hiller’s article also doesn’t sit well with me due to his fixation on people’s use of transportation, rather than the industries that fuel transportation. His brief mention of oil companies is about how it “seems correct” (Hiller) that they “are at least partially casually responsible for [climate change]” (Hiller). This phrasing is incredibly loose and indefinite, as if science hasn’t definitively proven that yes, oil companies are major contributors to climate change. This single mention of oil companies is incredibly brief and not even expanded upon before he goes right back to talking about how driving isn’t good for the environment. This brings about a second problem in that driving is incredibly necessary for some. There are people that simply live too far from their work to bike there, or have medical conditions that basically force them to not exert a large amount of physical strain. As mentioned regarding a previous article, there’s no way to fairly put every human under one sweeping generalization, and Hiller’s article is certainly no exception.