How much responsibility do corporations have for the climate crisis and for stepping up with solutions?
Here at the ISCFC we are committed to promoting personal, community, national and planetary solutions to reduce our environmental impacts and boldly confront the climate crisis. But as individuals, we can feel powerless when there are huge corporations -such as the fossil fuel industry and factory farms– that are disproportionately responsible for carbon emissions of the past and the present.
What should we do about this? Do you agree that corporations should do more? And if so, what does that mean exactly? How do we persuade or impel polluting industries to change their ways?
Corporate responsibility >
Corporation's Major role in Climate Change
Although everyone’s individual carbon footprint is still important, nothing one person could ever do will ever make an impact on the damage big corporations do. For example, Amazon emitted seventy-one million five hundred forty thousand metric tons of carbon, according to CNBC. Inspire Clean Energy said the average person around the world produces four tons of carbon per day. That means that it would take seventeen million eight hundred eighty-five thousand individuals to create the same amount of carbon as Amazon. This number is of course not completely accurate because it’s an average. Someone from America would have a much higher carbon output than someone in India or almost anywhere in the world. In my opinion in most places people don’t need to work on their carbon footprint all that much, America is my exception to that. Another piece of information I got from Inspire Clean Energy is that the average American produces twenty metric tons of carbon, that means it would only take three million five hundred seventy-seven thousand individuals from America to produce the same amount of carbon as Amazon. That is a sixty-seven million nine hundred sixty-three thousand person difference from the original number using the world average. That all being said, even with all Americans the corporation beat them by miles.