ENC 2135

A blog by Alexa Pagel for ENC 2135.

[thoughtsonclimate-blog]

A human-scale perspective on global warming: Zero emission year and personal quotas

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           Alberto De La Fuente expands on the point counter to my own, argued both by Toussaint and Hiller: personal responsibility matters.  De La Fuente takes it a step further than the previous two did, setting clear personal quotas on emissions and arguing that businesses are only such massive problems due to consumer demand.

            While the personal quotas are pretty self explanatory, the implications of consumers being to blame for climate change is incredibly complex.  This effectively puts the blame back on the shoulders of the world’s population rather than the largest companies in the world.  Though big businesses are proven to   account for the majority of CO2 emissions and climate change as a whole, the article states that “human consumption of goods, food and transportation are the ultimate drivers of climate change” (De La Fuente).  This implies that massive corporations only contribute so much to climate change because of what is demanded of them by consumers.  I simply do not know enough about the situation to definitively prove or deny this.  Are businesses cutting corners for sheer profit or is the demand for cheap and plentiful goods forcing their hand?  With a population 7.5 billion to feed and accommodate, will it even be possible to make a significant reduction to our contribution to climate change, or is it an inevitability? I cannot answer these questions, therefore, this article hasn’t exactly made me abandon my long-held claim that businesses are to blame, so much as regard it as one of many possibilities.

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Climate Change, Global Warming, and Too Much Sorry Business

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           Sandy Toussaint manages to add a complexity to the counterpoint that individuals take blame. While she’s under no illusions that an individual contribution is massively impactful, she thinks that in her society of Aboriginal Australians, efforts can and should be put forward to do better by the environment.

           This article brings up a point that I had previously not thought about and have since been unable to successfully refute; if she is able to call upon a group of marginalized, disenfranchised people to do what they can to better the environment, what excuse does everyone else have?  Sure there are still nuances with personal situations and people that are at an even bigger disadvantage than the Aboriginal people, but more  privileged  people are the ones that contribute to climate change more.  She doesn’t expect her people to suddenly stop their contribution to climate change, but instead calls upon them to not consume so much “non-nutritious take-away food that relies on beef fed by poorly designed irrigation projects” (Toussaint), among other things.  While no suggested change is ever universally applicable, this brings about a good point about doing, at the very least, something. While it’s impossible to expect everyone to completely change their lives and abide by every rule that limits their contribution to climate change, it should be expected of everyone to at least try to do something better.  

           The focus on ‘sorry business’ in this context refers to complacency in a way that implies that people can still do better, but they simply don’t want to in favor of feeling sorry for themselves.  It’s impossible for me to argue that my eating meat isn’t negatively impactful on the environment. If I went vegetarian, I’d be reducing my already minute contribution to climate change, but really all I’d be sacrificing would be the taste of meat and the extra money for the slightly more expensive vegetarian food.  But I’m not a vegetarian, and it’s possible to argue that it’s because I’d feel sorry for myself if I was, and it’s easy to be complicit and feel very unimpactful.

           Toussaint brings about a point that doesn’t change my viewpoint as much as it does add a little more complexity to it.  Though after reading this I still think it’s majorly up to large businesses, I also agree that it certainly doesn’t hurt for an individual to try to make a difference.

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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.

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Business and the environment

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           Trevor Russel’s article says in incredible detail what I wish to say with this blog.  Though the article itself is approaching its 20th birthday, it’s still fairly relevant, save for his praise of BP for acknowledging “ that the threat of global climate change caused by greenhouse gas emissions from the burning of coal and oil was serious enough to merit public attention and action” (Russel).  But how could he have known that that company would end up causing one of the biggest climate related disasters in recent memory?

           Russel brings about a point that many of the other articles don’t bring up, which is large businesses’ collective efforts to not take responsibility for their effect on the environment in the past.  These efforts have culminated in claims that large companies “do not know whether burning fossil fuels causes global warming” (Russel).  Today this is an easily disprovable statement, but perhaps 20 years ago it was not.  It is hard for me to suspend disbelief and humor the notion that businesses didn’t understand their impact upon the environment.  Russel himself effectively claims that these companies were merely coming up with excuses in order to not take the blame, and I think that if it weren’t for the clear scientific proof that they are the problem, these companies would likely still make outrageous claims like this today in order to shirk responsibility.

           The article is specifically about the Kyoto protocol, which calls on all members of the UN to reduce their greenhouse gas emissions.  The subject of the protocol makes it relevant to the point at hand, but the Kyoto protocol itself is currently not very relevant, so whether or not Russel’s article is still applicable to current day is up for debate, but I personally think it is, as it boils down to climate change, which is still very much a problem as displayed by numerous  other  articles in this blog.

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9 Things You Can Do About Climate Change

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                Jeff McMahon’s article in Forbes is one of the most complicated articles for me. Others are easy to form opinions on, but his is a bit awkward to deal with.  His article relies heavily on pathos. That his article lists “powerful things” (Mcmahon), without putting into perspective how much one person can change the environment on their own is deceptive to me.  In short, the article is a list of 9 things that an individual could and should do in order to reduce their contribution to climate change.  Something that seems so simple is deceptively complex.

                The article starts by saying that the government won’t do anything so that leaves it up to us individuals, a pretty logical progression of thought.  However, where McMahon and I diverge is what we think to be the best way to go about this responsibility.  I think the answer would be to try to force the government to take action, but he thinks it’s to change whatever personal issue he has that contributes to climate change.  To me, it’s unfair that the government won’t take action when I think that they should.  McMahon however, has accepted that fact and has decided that there’s nothing that he can do to change it, so the best that he can do is change what he personally does.  As some of the other  articles from this blog may suggest, this isn’t going to change much in the grand scheme of things.

                McMahon’s first point calls on the readers to become vegetarians, saying that greenhouse emissions from animal agriculture could be anywhere from 14-50% of all emissions.  While this brings up an issue regarding demand, which is easier addressed elsewhere, it also brings to light the fact that McMahon does understand the statistics, or a least knows of them.  He knows that the government should (but won’t) take action, and that big businesses account for a massive amount of climate change, but seems to peg the blame on each individual person.  McMahon’s article doesn’t sit right with me in the same way that the National Geographic article doesn’t, it puts the blame on people without taking into account individual situations.

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5 Ways to Curb Climate Change

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                The unnamed author or authors of the National Geographic infographic sectioned off what they had to say about climate change into five parts, ranging from personal to global solutions.  In terms of the question proposed within this blog, the infographic manages to spread the blame pretty evenly to everyone: individuals, businesses, even cities and governments.  

                Blaming everyone equally is something that I find it difficult to agree with.  While the article itself does not provide the statistics on the matter, it’s more trying to find a solution than place blame.  That said, the article itself has many shortcomings in regards to the topic of this blog.

                A lot of individual people cannot afford the luxury of travelling less, an example being if they work far from home.  Many people can’t shell out the money to have a ‘tiny home’ made believe it or not, because it’s easier to rent an apartment paycheck by paycheck than anything else.  Can people in bad neighborhoods really spend “more time outdoors” (National Geographic) without putting themselves in danger?  It’s impossible to present such ideas and seriously expect everyone to follow by them, individual situations are too varied to account for.

                The author or authors of the article seem to almost give businesses a free pass, by saying that many are putting forth efforts to help, but not really suggesting how they can improve.  It’s the subtle way that personal changes and business changes are presented that makes something about this article seem a little off to me. The section about personal responsibility seems more like ‘here are things that you can and should do!’ as if each individual human isn’t pulling their own weight.  Meanwhile, the section about businesses is presented basically like ‘here are things that businesses are already doing!’ as if big corporations are already doing enough and don’t need to improve any more.

                   While the article is fairly tame and attempts not to point fingers, it’s easy to see how phrasing things a certain way can subtly influence people to think a certain way on a matter which is at best suspicious and at worst, purposefully harmful to people’s understanding of the matter, which makes it difficult for me to view this article in a positive light.

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Trade Policy, Climate Change, and the Greening of Business

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              John Mathews puts forth the notion that large industries are doing their best by ‘going green’, specifically those in China and India. However, this article does not entirely contradict the previous ones as a business that’s ‘going green’ isn’t a business that’s entirely green; at least that’s how I see it.  It’s more environmentally friendly than many others, and certainly is heading in the right direction, but there’s still way more that can be done, but likely isn’t, in the name of money.  And, even worse, these are the ‘better’ businesses, and Mathews explicitly states that western industry models “cannot scale to accommodate the rising powers of the 21st century.” (Mathews).  In short, practices that are regular within businesses today may be impossible in the future due to a lack of resources.

              Mathews regards these practices with a mindset geared primarily towards the sustainability of certain practices, and secondarily towards their impact on the environment.  This doesn’t negate anything he says, but rather it puts into perspective what the article deems to be the issue with things like fossil fuel consumption.  Many of the other articles within this blog would regard the issue to be the impact upon the environment, which implies at least a bit of underlying pathos.  The Mathews paper takes an almost purely logical standpoint which is good because it relies solely on fact, but bad because it comes across in my eyes as him not caring about the environment.  As if to beat the metaphorical dead horse into the ground about where his priorities lie, Mathews heavily advocates for green business practices, not because of any explicitly stated concern for the environment, but rather for the money to be made by using “’clean tech’” (Mathews).

              While it’s hard to disagree with someone who takes a standpoint similar to one’s own point of view on a matter, it’s simultaneously difficult to agree with them when they take said standpoint for all of the wrong reasons.  Mathews plays into capitalism with his paper, while I consider the root of the problem to be capitalism, so it’s difficult to place the stance that I take regarding this paper.  More than anything else, it raises questions.  If businesses were to universally go green, would capitalism still be such a large issue?  Is it even possible for businesses to go completely green, or are they just going to find other ways to exploit the environment once fossil fuels and oil are no longer available?  Is incentivizing developing countries “to base their industrial strategies on green growth rather than black, coal – and oil – fired growth” (Mathews) a feasible and universally applicable plan?  More so, is Mathew’s definition of ‘green industry’ equal to my definition of ‘green industry’?  The problem is: I don’t know, and nobody can know for sure, so it’s impossible for me to definitively place this article as something that I agree or disagree with.

While there’s no doubt that I find Mathews’ intentions behind this article disagreeable at best, we inevitably both come to the same conclusion that businesses must go green, so we both want the same result, only for vastly different reasons.

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10. Decarbonisation: Innovation and the Economics of Climate Change

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           Dimitri Zenghelis’ paper explains when climate change started (the industrial revolution), why it’s such a huge problem (capitalism), and why it matters (the massively impactful implications of the global temperature rising 2 degrees Celsius). The main focus of his paper, however, is bringing forth a variety of options regarding changes that could benefit the environment; the vast majority of these options strictly regarding business practices.

           The sentiment behind the paper is easy to get behind: changes must be made in order to bring business’ contribution to climate change down to a manageable level.  In theory, a great number of people should want to back this concept.  The fact is, however, that net carbon emission of the world must be absolutely nothing in order to make climate change a manageable beast.  This implies exactly what it sounds like it does: a complete overhaul of business practices of the entire world, which has a very realistic potential to disrupt or destroy economies, governments, and ways of life in just about anywhere in the world.  To me, this is a radical proposition, and while it places a great amount of trouble on businesses, it’s impossible to know all of the potential risks of “the decarbonization of production, distribution, and consumption systems” (Zenghelis).  Of course immediately cutting out carbon and methane production (among other things) from business practices is ideal, but concepts don’t exist in a vacuum, and actions have consequences.  In a country so heavily dependent on capitalism, trying to cut out core practices of capitalist societies immediately and absolutely is, at best, a risk.

           Zenghelis brings forth perhaps the most extreme point of view, with a sentiment that I can get behind but a concerning execution that   and while it does require participation from ordinary people and businesses alike, articles previously talked about address the fact that businesses are the primary contributors to climate change, therefore such a change would require more effort from businesses than anything else, so my opinion still stands.

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Report Faults Big Companies on Climate

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           Barnaby Feder’s article in the New York Times, like the previous article, was also not peer reviewed, but it too was based almost entirely on logos – fact and interpretation.  What it lacks in recency, it makes up for in being incredibly relevant. The article regards a checklist of 14 environmentally friendly activities that companies should participate in in order to reduce their contribution to climate change.

           The fact that only two of the unnamed amounts of companies evaluated managed to participate in all 14 items on the list goes to show how little the majority of large corporations even care about the climate.  The fact that some of the larger companies “reported just four of the practices the report identified as prudent” (Feder) is proof that money matters more than the environment when it comes to big business.  With a society that’s only increasingly capitalistic, this article serves as proof that companies have not and will not willingly and actively help the environment; or at the very least not hinder it.  It has been, and will continue to be more effective in terms of money to use fossil fuels, dump refuse, and regard the environment as something that simply exists around a business, rather than something that relates to it in any way.  So, in this way, the notion that a business will not willingly care for the environment is timeless.

           In terms of the overarching question of this blog, this article goes hand-in-hand with the Goldenberg article and my personal thoughts on the matter: companies will continue to exploit the environment on a massive scale for their benefit until responsibility is forced upon them.  While there are shortcomings in believing that forcing businesses to treat the environment correctly is some simple task, this is the basest and broadest requirement to ask of big businesses that abuse the environment in the name of money.

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“Just 90 companies caused two-thirds of man-made global warming emissions”

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     Suzanne Goldenberg’s article for the Guardian manages to perfectly encapsulate why I held the opinion that I had upon starting this blog.  In short, the article explains how and why only 90 companies have managed to account for the vast majority of greenhouse gasses in the past 25 years. With the world exceeding 7.5 billion in population, it’s hard not to draw connections between this knowledge and the common practice of shaming individuals for their contribution to climate change.  Though not peer reviewed – unlike the vast majority of the works to be discussed within this blog – this article is credible and factual and raises the question: should businesses be put under the microscope for their practices, or is this an inevitability in a capitalist society?

           It’s difficult to not be critical of these massive companies, especially when the study within the article proves them to be majorly at fault for climate change. These companies have always been the problem “since the dawning of the industrial age” (Goldenberg).  Even more, the number people responsible for the greenhouse emissions is so small that, according to climate researcher Richard Heede, “they could all fit on a Greyhound bus or two” (Goldenberg).  That means that an absurdly small population of people is responsible for the vast majority of climate change so, in comparison, it seems a little misguided to shame ordinary people for daring to commute to work without carpooling, or not having the money to fix a leaky faucet.  This article, most notably, only says that 90 companies are to blame for 2/3 of greenhouse gases; this means that the other 1/3 is shared with every other company and human being in the world.  This means that around 7.5 billion people create only a portion of a third of the greenhouse gasses in the world; and divide whatever that is by 7.5 billion and each person is contributing less than 0.0000000044% to greenhouse gasses.

           I cannot, no matter what anything else says, ignore this fact: a single human being, living perfectly green or completely environmentally unfriendly, will make an absolutely undetectable difference in the change of the climate.  Though, even if every human managed to obtain the privilege to live a completely green life, it’s still difficult to ignore the fact that climate change is fueled almost entirely by capitalism and exploitation of the environment by massive companies.

           This article serves as the framework for my mindset going into this project, it provides the statistics and allows me a pretty clear perspective on why and how climate change is happening, who’s to blame, and leaves one question open for interpretation: what can be done?