There are many ways that individuals can adjust their own environmental impact, but the very idea of individual responsibility has also been used to distract from larger issues. Veuer’s Matt Hoffman has the story.
Category
🗞
NewsTranscript
00:00With the arrival of the new year, you may have resolved to do your part to help the environment.
00:04Here are a few actions you can take, as well as some larger perspective to keep in mind.
00:09The BBC recommends eating a plant-based diet,
00:11as the livestock used for meat release a large amount of greenhouse gases.
00:15America's National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration
00:18recommends using long-lasting, energy-efficient light bulbs,
00:21and, of course, turning out the lights when you leave a room.
00:24And members of the Sierra Club Toyabe chapter suggest
00:27divesting your own investments from institutions involved with fossil fuels.
00:31Some of those members also recommend buying an electric vehicle.
00:35But while transitioning to EVs may be important in the long run,
00:38the Brookings Institution says their current impact in the U.S. may be limited,
00:42as our electrical infrastructure is itself largely fueled by natural gas and coal.
00:46And this illustrates how the impact of individual environmental action can be limited, or even misleading.
00:52In 2021, Geoffrey Supran and Naomi Oreskes of Harvard
00:55published a study in which they argued that, as they said in a Los Angeles Times op-ed,
01:00oil company ExxonMobil uses rhetoric aimed at shifting responsibility for climate change
01:05away from itself and onto consumers.
01:07In fact, the very phrase, carbon footprint, was invented by another oil company, BP,
01:13as part of a 2004 PR campaign.
01:15And an NPR-slash-PBS frontline investigation in 2020 found that the plastics industry
01:21promoted recycling and downplayed the practice's difficulties
01:24as a way of suppressing concerns about their own product.
01:27Of course, individual environmental action can make a difference,
01:30but it won't be a substitute for a larger change at the social level.