Corporates must step up. The planet’s at stake.
Average Australians are being urged to do their bit for the planet with increasing frequency, while the real culprits behind our surging carbon emissions hide from responsibility, writes Tory Shepherd.
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A wicked climate-change hoax is being played on the Australian people.
They’ve tricked us into thinking it’s our job to save the planet. That it’s our personal responsibility to redeem the climate, one electric car at a time. One compostable rubbish bag at a time. One carbon offset at a time.
How the coal fondlers must chortle, as the Australian people debate the relative evil of powering their Prius with energy from fossil fuels.
Don’t take that the wrong way – anyone who happily belches out emissions or refuses to recycle is a bum. And the combined effort of people who make moral choices can shift markets, so ultimately, big companies might change their polluting ways. Individuals should still make the most ethical choices they can.
But it is still, overwhelmingly, industry and government who have to do the heavy lifting when it comes to climate change.
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It just behoves them to see us suffer the guilt of buying disposable nappies, the horror of leaving the heater on, the expense of household solar, the tedium of meat-free meals.
The 2017 Carbon Majors Report showed just 100 companies – globally – are responsible for more than 70 per cent of carbon emissions: ExxonMobil, Shell, BP. We consume but they’re the ones who haven’t fixed the system.
Climate change isn’t the only area where the powerful try to shift the blame to the individual, of course. The Federal Government’s rhetoric is incessantly focused on personal responsibility. Don’t have a job? Your fault. Need welfare? Your fault.
As Prime Minister Scott Morrison is fond of saying: “If you have a go, you get a go”. It’s a patently false idea with a patently obvious intended meaning: Don’t blame us if your life isn’t going swimmingly.
The poverty-stricken single mum who can’t afford rent in the overheated property market, let alone buying a house. The 60-year-old who is cast aside from the jobs market. The kid from the rural town with mental-health issues.
It’s their fault they can’t escape their lot? Neat trick, dudes in suits.
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Academics have looked at this responsibility shift for years, and marvelled at its success, at how neoliberal governments have convinced people they are the authors of their own misfortune.
And it may have happened, at least in part, as individuals frustrated at a lack of action on climate change, take it upon themselves. They fight their feelings of powerlessness by hanging out the sheets instead of using the dryer.
One of the reasons the conservative cohort was so triggered by Greta Thunberg and by the recent climate strikes was that the finger of blame was being pointed the right way. Publicly.
Instead of reading Ten Handy Hints On Greening Your Home, people were calling for action from the top.
In the past couple of weeks, there have been a range of heaving numpties who even tried to use the idea of personal responsibility to discredit those climate-change activists.
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One of the many ways bullies tried to diminish Ms Thunberg was by pointing out that, as she sailed to America to save on carbon emissions a flight would have belched out, she had a plastic water bottle. Hypocrite, they frothed.
With the climate protests she inspired across the globe, the ranters pointed to their smartphones, their cars, their modern lives with the concomitant carbon emissions.
They were trying to dismiss the arguments about how we’re killing the world by suggesting you can’t raise concerns unless you are a one-person carbon sink who only eats fruit that has fallen from the tree and wears clothes made from old Coke bottles.
Just another tactic to stop that finger being pointed the right way.
Ditch the car for the bike, reconsider that flight. Reduce, reuse, recycle. And speak out whenever you hear someone arguing that their contribution to climate change is just a drop in the rising ocean (hello, Federal Government).
But don’t fall for this trickster push to make individuals pick up the greater responsibility for action, when it’s clear who the real culprits are.