You’ve all heard some variation on the classic adage “turn out the lights, conserve water, go vegan.” Switching to public transportation and carbon-free activities like cycling and walking is also frequently recommended. These are the steps everyday people are urged to take to prevent the destruction of planet Earth. While these actions are objectively beneficial, there’s something insidious going on that cancels out all our good work. We are not the group with the biggest negative impact on the planet. Even if the average American did everything right, it wouldn’t end the burning rampage of climate change. Individual impacts are dwarfed by the ponderous footprints of corporations. If we continue to allow fossil fuel companies to burn through nonrenewable resources and rowdily belch pollutants into the atmosphere, Earth will become uninhabitable.
According to a Stanford report, greenhouse gas emissions must reach net zero by 2050 in order to minimize damage to societies, and we must halve them by 2030. The 2017 Carbon Majors report by the Carbon Disclosure Project (CDP) tells us that just 100 companies are responsible for 71 percent of greenhouse gas emissions. One hundred. That’s all. With just a few major sanctions on fossil fuel companies, we could be well towards our goal of a carbon-neutral future.
For too long, companies have been allowed to drain the Earth dry of her nonrenewable resources with impunity, doing whatever it takes to make a profit. Currently, using dirty energy is too good a business opportunity to pass up. This must change if we are to curb the emissions of the biggest polluters. One way to do this is for investors, stockholders, and shareholders to hold corporations accountable. If the companies do not serve the interests of humanity, these stakeholders need to cut them off. By divesting and boycotting irresponsible corporations until they are about to go under, consumers place pressure on them to do better. It is sad and frustrating that negative incentives are necessary to make corporations clean up their act, but this is the stage to which the climate crisis has progressed. If fossil fuel companies will not cooperate, they must be abolished. This is only a stopgap: in the long term, the systems that allow them to arise must be eradicated.
Governmental action is also necessary to cut carbon emissions. Heavy carbon taxes, stringent regulations on emissions, and mandatory transitions to clean energy are the bare minimum if we wish to truly achieve carbon neutrality. Creating economic motives for corporations to behave themselves seems to be the only way to get through to them at this point, considering that progress towards carbon neutrality has been sluggish under the climate-change-denying Trump. His administration rolled back what meager climate protection policies America had to begin with, and the current administration must be absolutely uncompromising in their strides towards carbon neutrality if they are to offset the damage caused by years of climate denial at the highest levels of government. I fear that the Biden administration will be too compromising to achieve this goal. We will not somehow achieve a “happy medium” by pandering to people who will gladly let the world burn as long as they profit. Bipartisanship is certainly not the solution, but I question whether even the more progressive of our two major political parties is motivated enough to achieve carbon neutrality. Clearly, neither party is interested in ending capitalism, the system that brought us natural-gas-guzzling giants of industry in the first place. As long as capitalism survives, corruption and profit-over-planet decisions will be rewarded.
If the government will not hold corporations accountable and eradicate capitalism as swiftly as possible, the people must hold the government itself accountable. According to CNBC, the US Department of Defense is the world’s largest institutional consumer of fossil fuels. Therefore, if the US slashed military spending and diverted it towards clean energy goals instead, the effect would be twofold. President Biden should reduce the costly and unnecessary American military presence in Afghanistan, Bahrain, Iraq, and other Middle Eastern countries where the “war on terror” has ironically been a source of terror for innocent civilians for decades. Choosing peaceful relations with other countries and ending American imperialism will undoubtedly have a positive impact on our climate, not to mention prosperity in the regions that the U.S. has been repressing for far too long.
In conclusion, we cannot stave off the destruction of our planet through individual lifestyle changes alone. We must attack the systems that are the main source of the problem: capitalism and its highest form, imperialism. We must end corporations who prioritize profit over sustainability and government departments that do more harm than good. Earth day is April 22, but environmentally and socially conscious people do not have to wait until then to take action. Before, during, and after this Earth day, let’s run fossil fuel companies into the ground. Let’s protest pipelines that ruin indigenous lands and facilitate the transportation of crude oil, ripe for burning. Let’s strike down the institutions with the biggest carbon footprints, even if they aren’t explicitly fossil fuel companies, like the US Pentagon. Capitalism and imperialism have characterized America since its conception and have critically wounded our prospects of saving the planet. In fact, if it weren’t for these systems, perhaps the planet would not need to be saved at all. It is time to decide whether America cares more about profit or planet Earth. Let’s make the right choice.