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Victor Resco of God, University of Lleida
Human activities have led to a serious environmental crisis and, although official geology does not recognize it as a new era, some consider that we have entered the Anthropocene, a new period characterized by the omnipresent human footprint.
But when we talk about the “human footprint”, what do we mean? That is, whose activities, exactly, have created this crisis? We have been told over and over again that our lifestyle, that of ordinary citizens, is unsustainable and that we are to blame for climate change. But the repetition of a mantra does not transform a story into reality.
This is one of the many false ecological dogmas that have been installed in the collective imagination and that actually aggravate the environmental crisis.
As I explain in the book Ecomites (Plataforma Actual, 2024), the idea that ordinary citizens are responsible for climate change is, precisely, the worst of all environmental hoaxes. How did this idea arise and why does it delay the effective response to the environmental crisis?
Inequality in emissions
A consequence of the ecomitte of individual responsibility is that overpopulation underlies all environmental problems. If the problem is ordinary citizens, the severity of the problem logically increases with the number of inhabitants.
This idea has been widely disseminated by different environmental entities, studies published in scientific literature and even well-known and loved people, such as David Attenborough or Jane Goodall.
As a result, these environmental entities have received funds to carry out birth control programs in countries of the global south that sometimes include sterilization. These programs have been funded by large corporations and some governments.
The data, however, paint a very different reality: 10% of the population, the wealthiest, are responsible for 50% of emissions. On the contrary, the humblest 50% of the population barely emits 10% of the total.
The problem is not, therefore, that there are too many of us, but that a minority elite is consuming an absolutely disproportionate amount of resources (and financing NGOs to perpetuate the story).
Individual actions are insufficient
We have just described the two extremes: that of the richest 10% and that of the poorest 50%. Surely, most readers of this article will be in the middle 40%. The data once again reveals how, even if we make great sacrifices on a personal level to reduce our environmental footprint, we will not be able to transition to a sustainable way of life.
Researchers from the North American Massachusetts Institute of Technology quantified the carbon footprint of a homeless person in the United States: it is 8.5 tons of CO₂ per year, which exceeds the average of a Spanish citizen (5.7 tons per year) or any Latin American country (ranging between 0.9 tons per year in Honduras and 4.9 in Chile).
A US citizen will therefore always emit more than an average citizen in these countries, regardless of their individual actions. This tells us the importance of the socioeconomic context in which we live, which will determine our carbon footprint.
The carbon footprint trap
The tendency to blame citizens for the environmental crisis goes back a long way. In the recent past, the most important moment was surely the advertising campaign developed by the oil company BP in 2004.
The company opened its commercials with a concept that, at that time, no one knew: “Do you know your carbon footprint?” The ad provided the web address of the first carbon footprint calculator, so we could calculate how much CO₂ we emit at an individual level. That is, what is our individual contribution to climate change.
And that is when, magically, responsibility for climate change stopped being the responsibility of large corporations and became the responsibility of citizens. The indiscriminate emissions of greenhouse gases no longer resulted from the burning of fossil fuels or the activity of oil companies, but from our daily lives.
The “grand coalition”
Another consequence of the carbon footprint has been the development of carbon markets: companies pay a fee for the CO₂ they emit and pass that price on to the consumer. In addition, they are allowed to “offset” their CO₂ emissions through tree plantations.
The origin of these markets can be found in the famous Kyoto climate summit in 1997, where the US pressured the European Union to accept this system. In Kyoto, a coalition was also established between oil companies and different environmental entities, which joined the US to force acceptance by the EU.
The data tells us that this market has generated extra income for European energy companies of around €7 billion per year as a result of the increase in the price of their products. The decrease in emissions, however, has been anecdotal.
Some environmental entities have developed programs to promote the planting of 1 billion trees, in collaboration with the Davos Forum. That is to say, many “conservationist” NGOs receive millions of dollars in donations from big business magnates so that tree plantations are carried out in their name. Unfortunately, science has shown us, time and time again, that these plantations do not offset emissions: the only option is to forget about the greenwashing and stop broadcasting.
The coalition that the polluting multinationals have established with the large environmental entities has created a story that, as I explain in Ecomites, prevents effective climate action by blaming the citizen for a problem they did not create. And all this happens in collusion with the legislator, who is the one who really has the power to address the problem.
That is why citizen action, where it can be most effective, is by pressuring the legislator to take measures thinking about the common good, and ignoring the pressure from these lobbies.
Ordinary citizens are, in many cases, more victims than culprits. Remember, for example, the people who died due to the increase in heat waves. Or those who live near the sea and, in the coming decades, may be left homeless.
Víctor Resco de Dios, Professor of forestry engineering and global change, University of Lleida
This article was originally published on The Conversation. Read the original.