State of the Earth: The Role of Oil Corporations in Exacerbating Climate Change
image courtesy of shortlist.com
BY ALISON CAO ‘22
While wildfires continue to wreak havoc in America and Brazil and a historically catastrophic hurricane season devastates the Atlantic coast, the pressure on individuals to forestall climate change is becoming more urgent than ever. As a realistic means of reducing humanity’s carbon footprint, theoretically preventing the world’s average temperature from rising any further, consumers have been advised to alter minor aspects of their own lifestyles: Eat less meat. Buy a metal straw (save the turtles!). And, most simply, recycle the plastic you consume.
Of course, the assumption behind these guidelines is that since consumers are liable for exacerbating climate change, we should be the ones to curb it. Yet, while our living habits have contributed significantly to global warming, so too has the activity of corporations: Just a hundred oil and gas companies are behind 71 percent of carbon emissions.
By now, this statistic isn’t revelatory; the carbon report which originally collected the information was actually published in 2015. The knowledge that corporations are chiefly responsible for gas emissions has been available for at least five years, and the methods by which consumers can reduce their own environmental impact have been publicized for even longer. What has gone unexamined is the relationship between the two—specifically, how oil companies have deflected accountability for climate change by actually encouraging consumer sustainability.
Their counterintuitive method of avoiding responsibility is best exemplified by recycling. Just two weeks ago, an investigation by NPR found that the oil industry has continually misled the public about the effectiveness of plastic recycling. Despite knowing since the 1970s that it would never be commercially viable—less than 10 percent of plastic has ever been recycled—companies like Chevron and ExxonMobil have spent millions of dollars on recycling ads for years, singlehandedly fooling the public into believing that plastic could be processed into new products. Their campaign was so successful that blue recycling bins are now an omnipresent sight in the United States, and recycling is considered the most basic of gestures a person could make toward sustainability.
The impact of this lie can’t be overstated; in no small part due to public faith in plastic renewal, plastic production is now expected to triple by 2050. Oil companies didn’t advertise recycling to the public just to deflect blame. They were also aware that if the public believed recycling worked, consumers could be encouraged to buy new plastic without concerns for potential environmental ramifications. Ultimately, they prioritized their own economic growth over any sense of integrity to the people upon whose consumption they depended, encouraging the public to feel responsible for sustainability while furtively working against those very intentions.
Yet to call these companies evil or malicious would be misleading. Although their damage upon the planet is irreversible and their deception of the public inexcusable, their incentive behind both actions is only an extension of their existence within our country’s economy. Since the U.S. chiefly operates upon a capitalist economic system, Chevron and ExxonMobil are driven by economic competition to persist; lying to the public about the consequences of plastic consumption was simply a strategy to ensure that they could continue producing plastic and, consequently, continue to survive.
Essentially, for an oil company to truly take responsibility for its effects on the environment, that company would have to stop producing oil and therefore stop existing entirely; any of the company’s external attempts to mitigate global warming would be stymied by the damaging products it makes to survive. No matter what other conservationist efforts it could strive to make, its identity as a corporation in a competitive, capitalist economy would always be fundamentally irreconcilable with its responsibility for the planet’s well-being.
It’s a cruel, sad irony: Despite not being its chief perpetrators, individuals will always be considered responsible for preventing climate change, because to hold a corporation accountable would mean dismantling the corporation itself—a task we’re powerless to accomplish. Yet that’s not the narrative that we’ve been told. Instead, we’re led to believe that if enough of us make small adjustments to our daily lives—using public transportation, turning off the lights when we leave the room, and always, always recycling—we can eventually make the tide of climate change recede.
All this is not to say that we shouldn’t be environmentally conscious; now more than ever, we need to realize the repercussions our actions will have upon the planet. But we should also acknowledge how deeply climate change has been entrenched in our pre-existing economic structures. As long as corporations go unchallenged within our broader system of capitalism, they can’t, and won’t, try to alleviate the worsening state of the earth—even though times like these, when the brutal effects of climate change are becoming devastatingly evident, are when they need to realize their impact the most.