They want us focused on our footprints

Instead, let's talk about blameprints.

Here’s a thing I’ve been thinking about a lot since last week’s post:

If the whole concept of carbon footprint is a ruse conjured by Big Oil—and if our individual choices correspondingly don’t matter—how do we break that news to people? How can it be part of a message that motivates? That inspires us to put our collective footprint up Big Oil’s collective ass?

The answer is not obvious. When it comes to the importance of our individual climate footprint, a ton of people on Team Climate—regular folks but also activists, entrepreneurs, investors—are entrenched. And academics, too. Here’s a bit from the conclusion of a recent-ish paper called Individual Responsibility for Collective Climate Change Harms. Don’t worry, it’s only three sentences:

This work has shown that even on collectivist grounds, individuals can be assigned primary duties to reduce their GHG emissions. Following Cripps (Citation2013), this work held the unstructured group of GHG emitters weakly collectively responsible for harm resulting from the predictable aggregation of their individual acts. However, it argued against Cripps that what follows from this is a corresponding collective duty to act qua group to bring about an end to the harm and a derivative duty for each emitter to promote the required organization of a group capable of such a collective action.

That was only three sentences? It’s true. Also true: reading crazy long academic sentences with no periods is torture but also oddly almost fun in its own perverse linguistic way? No? Just me? But don’t bail on me just yet. This next bit drills down on the climate footprint concept (albeit without using the term):

Instead, it was argued that acts of GHG emission, to the extent that they are avoidable and performed with requisite knowledge, make one into a member of a group that is morally responsible for climate-related harm. Individual emitters who can do otherwise (i.e. not emit at reasonable cost to themselves) should recognize themselves as members of a group that collectively harms.

That bold at the end there was added by me, obvs. Because it’s the central conclusion of the paper, and I don’t disagree with it. Yes, let’s recognize ourselves as members of a group—but a group that’s collectively trapped in a dirty system. The genius of carbon footprint is self-evident in climate circles. It’s worked to such an extent that an overwhelming amount of outreach by climate orgs leads with how you can get involved by changing your energy consumption habits.