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Dear Reader,
Dot’s friend Debbie recently lamented that she’s not “as eco-minded” as Dot. “I don’t compost,” she said to me. “I don’t drive an electric car. I like hamburgers.”
I pointed out to Debbie that she lives in a tiny two bedroom house in a large city with great public transit and most of what she needs just a bike ride or walk away. Also, she raised only one child, compared to Dot’s three. “If we’re measuring carbon footprints,” I said to her, “mine is larger.”
But berating ourselves for our carbon footprints is misguided. Lots of us in the environmental movement have pointed out that the concept of each of us having a carbon footprint — the product of an advertising campaign by the British oil giant BP in 2004 — shifts responsibility for climate change from corporations and governments onto individuals. The truth is, while we can control some things, there’s plenty that we can’t, given that our economies are built largely on the fossil fuel industry.
But now, CBC reports, U.K.-based researchers have proposed a potentially better way to score individual climate action. “By having people fill out a wide-ranging survey that asks them questions about their relationships, jobs, and other areas of their lives, the researchers hope to build a much more comprehensive — and useful — accounting of everything a person is able to do to fight climate change.” They’re calling it “carbon capability,” and the concept is built on a framework of structure and agency, they explain. “Agency is this idea of what people have free choice and free will over, and structure are all the things that make that either easier or more difficult.” Carbon capability puts that together to help us better understand what role we can reasonably play. For instance, we have agency over whether we repair our clothes instead of throwing them away. But we have less (though not zero) control over the larger structural problem of fast fashion’s use of synthetic textiles and poor treatment of its workers.
Dot is an avowed believer that small choices that reduce our individual climate impact can also improve our individual lives by leading us to healthier meals, greater physical activity, and deeper engagement with our communities. But there’s no doubt that systemic changes in how we fuel our homes and vehicles and how we grow and transport our food really moves the needle.
In other words, it all matters, the small choices and the big societal shifts. But let’s agree to not let the ad campaign of a petroleum company convince us that we’re the problem.
Inculpably,
Dot
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