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 >
Does our, the average person’s, Carbon Footprint Truly Matter: The Pat
It is estimated that, during 2015, the richest 10% accounted for 49% of the global CO2 emissions while the 50% of the world in lower income brackets only accounted for a mere 7%. Some of our world’s richest billionaires also produce 1,000,000 times the amount of CO2 than the amount emitted by 90% of people. However, it is never the billionaires that are seen or heavily encouraged to “go green”, no billionaires count their carbon/ecological footprint. Even if every person decreased their carbon footprints to zero a mere 125 billionaires will have created 395 million metric tons of carbon emissions. So why are we, the people that are barely accounting for anything trying to cut down our emissions? Will it really make a difference?
I am not trying to say that regular people should stop caring about their carbon/ecological footprint, but rather that the drastic changes that need to be made in society are not by the general public but by large corporations and by our world’s top 10%. If even one rich/famous person, I will use Taylor Swift as an example, stopped flying on private jets then that would account for 1,000 people not using any energy in their homes for a year. All it would take is the banning of private jets/flights and tens of thousands of energy would be preserved. Or if the governments of the world were to regulate carbon emissions of major corporations, especially big oil, then our global ecological footprint would most likely go down by a lot, especially since Big Oil produces an approximated 5.1 billion metric tons of greenhouse gases. Such major changes should be made instead of regulating average people’s everyday lives.
Sources/Additional Resources:
https://www.iea.org/commentaries/the-wo … e-bottom-1
https://www.theguardian.com/environment … ding-study
https://www.scientificamerican.com/arti … hy-people/
https://www.iea.org/commentaries/the-wo … e-bottom-1
https://www.npr.org/2022/11/09/11354467 … -emissions
https://www.cnbc.com/2022/11/08/billion … oxfam.html
https://time.com/6208632/celebrities-cl … ts-yachts/
https://www.iea.org/reports/emissions-f … ransitions