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Shopping Differently Won't Solve the Climate Crisis, So What Should We Do Instead?
Large companies like BP have taught us to track what we buy, and take responsibility for what we do with the stuff we buy, so that they won’t have to stop making and selling the stuff we buy from them or deal with laws regulating how they do it.
Sep 26, 2025
This article has been adapted from Somebody Should Do Something: How Anyone Can Help Create Social Change (The MIT Press, September 16, 2025) by Michael Brownstein, Alex Madva, and Daniel Kelly. It is taken from Chapter 1: “You Do You: The Misdirected Individualist History of Climate Activism,” and is provided courtesy of the publisher.
Your Footprint, Your Responsibility
The more recent notion of everyone having a “personal carbon footprint” has similar roots in the dark arts of corporate PR. The oil giant BP popularized the term and bent it to its own purposes.
BP worked from the same playbook as the Ad Council. After acknowledging that climate change exists, the company makes you feel responsible for it. And then they give you something to do that helps you feel like you're part of the solution. Meanwhile, BP continues pumping away, enjoying massive federal subsidies and outlandish profits while avoiding any new, restrictive regulations.
The strategy was popular. One analysis of decades of ExxonMobil’s public communications found that the corporation framed climate change in terms of consumer energy demand when speaking publicly. But in internal company documents, ExxonMobil recognized that it could not continue to supply fossil fuels without disastrous consequences to the environment. They knew they were causing the problem (supply) but put the blame on us (consumer demand).
The general template should sound familiar. What causes climate change? We do. How? Driving gas guzzlers, leaving on the lights, and buying unrecyclable plastic. What’s the solution? Stop doing these things. Consume better.
ExxonMobil even conducted its own secret research on climate change in the 1970s. The results were consistent with scientific predictions. The corporation's in-house models predicted that global temperatures would rise to within 0.2°C of what they have in fact risen to since. While it publicly claimed in 1997 that “some of today’s prophets of doom from global warming were predicting the coming of a new ice age,” in the 1970s, Exxon’s own scientists had privately been in agreement all along with the overwhelming majority of published science on climate forecasting.
Once you know what to look for, you start to see the message of personal responsibility everywhere. Worried about retirement? Start saving more. Have a gambling problem? Exercise some willpower and stay away from the casino. Worried about obesity? Fix your lifestyle. From 2008 to 2010, 87 percent of all alcohol ads in magazines told consumers to “drink responsibly.”
While it was becoming clearer that Americans consume too much sugar, Coca-Cola fought back by subsidizing research arguing that the problem was not calories in but calories out: “Americans are overly fixated on how much they eat and drink while not paying enough attention to exercise.” The central plank of the food industry’s lobbying has been to frame discussions about eating habits in terms of personal responsibility (e.g., “portion control”).
What these messages minimize are all the social, structural, and systemic drivers of health problems like diabetes. In one New York Times article, Dr.Dean Schillinger explained how “our entire society is perfectly designed to create Type 2 diabetes.” There is no amount of scolding about sugary foods and exercise, he explains, and “no device, no drug powerful enough to counter the effects of poverty, pollution, stress, a broken food system, cities that are hard to navigate on foot, and inequitable access to healthcare, particularly in minority communities.”
Yet these companies have devoted enormous amounts of money to teaching the public to focus on the symptoms rather than the underlying system. They have taught us to track what we buy, and take responsibility for what we do with the stuff we buy, so that they won’t have to stop making and selling the stuff we buy from them or deal with laws regulating how they do it.
A Too-Convenient Model for Facing Inconvenient Truths
Whole social movements have been built around this individualist, little-things-add-up ethos. An iconic poster from the early days of the modern environmental movement mirrors the Ad Council’s claim that personal choices are both the cause of and the solution to pollution. This individualist thinking prevailed all the way from the 1970s environmental movement to May 2006, which marks one of the biggest box office events in documentary history: the release of Al Gore’s An Inconvenient Truth. The documentary reached millions of people around the world. Its vivid depictions of solar rays pelting the atmosphere and glaciers melting raised public awareness of climate change to new heights and ignited collective fervor about the environment like never before. It demanded action.
Widely and deservedly lauded, An Inconvenient Truth presented the facts in a way that was hard to argue with. It also presented solutions:
Each one of us is a cause of global warming, but each one of us can make choices to change that with the things we buy, the electricity we use, the cars we drive; we can make choices to bring our individual carbon emissions to zero. The solutions are in our hands, we just have to have the determination to make it happen. We have everything that we need to reduce carbon emissions, everything but political will. But in America, the will to act is a renewable resource.
The general template should sound familiar. What causes climate change? We do. How? Driving gas guzzlers, leaving on the lights, and buying unrecyclable plastic. What’s the solution? Stop doing these things. Consume better. This is another effect of the long history of corporate-funded individualist messaging: the first thing that comes to mind for many of us when we ask “what can I do?” is a series of thoughts about stuff. What should I buy? Where should I buy it from? What should I do with it? Even leaders in the fight against climate change have perpetuated our preoccupation with consumption.
As the credits of An Inconvenient Truth roll, the film offers concrete suggestions for how to make a difference, stating, “The climate crisis can be solved. Here’s how to start.” Here are the first five items in the list:
- Buy energy-efficient appliances + lightbulbs.
- Change your thermostat . . . to reduce energy for heating + cooling.
- Weatherize your house, increase insulation, get an energy audit.
- Recycle.
- If you can, buy a hybrid car.
These are good things to do, though energy-inefficient incandescent bulbs are basically illegal now and hybrid cars may be on their way to being old news. But An Inconvenient Truth exemplifies a whole world of books, TV, and academic research that looks at climate change through the lens of our personal consumer choices. Even academics have gotten in on the act. One widely cited study examined and ranked nearly 150 personal lifestyle choices by their effectiveness in reducing personal carbon footprints. The four most impactful options, it found, are having one child, living car-free, flying less, and eating a plant-based diet. Eventually, further down the list of action items, An Inconvenient Truth also tells viewers to do the following:
- Vote for leaders who pledge to solve this crisis.
- Write to congress.
- If they don’t listen, run for congress
- Speak up in your community.
- Insist that America freeze CO2 emissions + join international efforts to stop global warming.
These suggestions head in a different direction, away from what we buy. They gesture toward our political choices and our communities’ values. This is promising, and we’ll talk a lot more about why in the coming chapters. For now, notice how vague they are. “Speak up in your community” sounds empowering, but what does it really mean? Speak up to whom? Say what? “Join international efforts” sounds good too. But your average moviegoer may be forgiven for thinking, “Yeah, I’ll get right on that.” Most viewers likely walked out feeling alarmed, maybe intending to buy better lightbulbs. After all, lightbulbs were first on the list!
It turns out audiences did become both more knowledgeable and more concerned about the climate crisis. But this new found knowledge and concern doesn’t appear to have amounted to much, at least in the short term. One study found that a month after seeing the film, viewers had done next to nothing to put their newfound climate knowledge into action. Not one of them had examined their carbon footprint or written a letter to their senator.
Another study found that framing solutions in terms of individual consumer choices decreases people's willingness to take other forms of action to fight climate change. Maybe people feel like they’re being blamed for a global crisis beyond their control. Maybe they resent being asked to respond with what to them looks like merely symbolic, even futile, changes to their personal behavior. The danger, then, is not just that such messages don’t help. It’s that they might be making things worse.
System Change, Not Climate Change
Some people have started to get wise to this long history of corporations laying problems at the feet of individuals. The backlash it’s helped create has produced slogans now found on fridge magnets, protest posters, and newspaper headlines. The most common ones suggest a different kind of thing to do: stop worrying about personal choices, and start focusing on changing the system. The news site Vox published an article in 2019 whose headline perfectly expresses this idea: “I Work in the Environmental Movement. I Don’t Care If You Recycle.”
The Sunrise Movement, a decentralized, youth-led group at the forefront of progressive climate politics, advocates system change: “to abolish or reimagine institutions that degrade our communities and our climate.” This marks a generational sea change in climate activism. Abolishing or reimagining institutions was most certainly not on An Inconvenient Truth’s list. Writing for the New Yorker, Andrew Marantz recounts a telling experience with a Sunrise group in Philadelphia:
The organizers were scanning the menu of a Middle Eastern restaurant on Uber Eats. Aru Shiney-Ajay, Sunrise’s training director, sat at a laptop, taking orders. “Can you get me a beef kebab?” Dejah Powell, an organizer from Chicago, said. “Or, no. Beef is the worst, right? Maybe chicken. Or falafel?”
“Dejah,” an activist named John Paul Mejia said, in a mock-scolding tone. He started reciting a movement adage, using the singsong rhythm of a call-and-response: “The biggest driver of emissions is . . .” The others joined him, in unison: “. . . the political power of the fossil-fuel industry, not individual behavior.” In other words, if you want the beef, get the beef.
One way to think about Sunrise’s system-over-individual logic is to recall Iron Eyes Cody. We called him a fraud, but looked at another way, his personal deception obscures the bigger story. A first-generation Sicilian American was able to play some of the most iconic Native American roles in Hollywood because the movie industry excluded actual Native Americans from taking those roles. The biases woven into cultural norms and movie business practices allowed, and incentivized, Cody’s personal fraud. Too much focus on what he should or shouldn’t have done, as a single person, makes it easy to overlook the system that structured his options and made his personal choices possible in the first place. Coming to appreciate the significance of systems can be disorienting, but keeping that significance firmly in view is crucial to understanding the bigger picture. The little-things-add-up take on individual responsibility is too easily weaponized by corporations advancing their own interests. When it comes to climate change, they have long pushed a picture where “taking action” means tweaking our shopping choices. It’s this history that Sunrise and other progressive climate activists are rightly standing at war, yelling stop.
But even if we accept this change in perspective, it’s not at all obvious what we should do next. To take that step, we’ll look at another area of life where a loud chorus is rightly demanding structural change.
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Tax the Rich and Corporations to Close the Climate Finance Gap
New analysis by the Tax Justice Network shows that governments could raise an additional $2.6 trillion each year by applying a modest wealth tax to the richest 0.5% of households and ending corporate tax abuse.
Jul 01, 2025
As the climate crisis accelerates, global fault lines are widening. Wealthy nations are gutting aid budgets while pouring fortunes into their militaries. Their climate finance commitments ring empty, masked by claims that public funds have run dry. But the reality is different: The money is there, and a bold tax justice agenda can unlock it. Reclaiming tax sovereignty—the power to decide how wealth is taxed and where it goes—can shift resources away from billionaires and corporate giants to fund real climate solutions.
This isn’t a funding gap. It’s a sovereignty gap.
New analysis by the Tax Justice Network shows that governments could raise an additional $2.6 trillion each year by applying a modest wealth tax to the richest 0.5% of households and ending corporate tax abuse. That would be more than enough to meet global climate finance needs and still leave most countries with billions to invest in care, education, and green jobs at home.
Extreme wealth fuels climate inaction, rising debt, and inequality. In a world on fire, refusing to tax those who profit most is no longer neutral—it’s a global risk.
The climate crisis is accelerating. Floods, heatwaves, and crop failures are pushing more people into precarity. The costs of climate adaptation, mitigation, and loss and damage are projected to reach $9 trillion per year by 2030. Yet the global community is still scrambling to honor a $100 billion pledge first made over 15 years ago.
As the Bonn climate talks come to a close and attention turns to the fourth Financing for Development conference in Seville, climate finance remains a structural void that policy declarations alone cannot fill. On the road to COP30 in Belém, governments face a critical choice: Keep chasing inadequate voluntary climate finance handouts, or finally confront the rigged tax systems that let the superrich and big polluters amass obscene wealth while the planet burns.
Tax Justice Network reveals that fair taxation of extreme wealth combined with measures to curb cross-border tax abuse by multinational corporations could raise $2.6 trillion each year—enough to more than double the $1.3 trillion annual climate finance goal that United Nations member countries are aiming to reach by 2030. The real issue isn’t where new money will come from, but why governments keep letting existing public resources leak through the cracks of a broken tax system.
By applying a minimal annual wealth tax of 1.7-3.5% and reclaiming tax revenue from multinationals that underpay tax, countries could unlock additional tax revenue equivalent to 2.4%of global GDP. This is money that could be raised today if governments stopped letting it slip away through loopholes and inaction.
We modeled what countries could raise and contribute based on historic responsibility for emissions. The results are striking. If countries were to contribute to a global climate finance fund sized at $300 billion—the lower end of the current debate—then 89% of countries could cover their share and still have billions left over for public services. Even if the fund were scaled up to $1.5 trillion, 58% of countries would still contribute their fair share and have billions to spare.
Take the United States. It could raise enough additional revenue to contribute $365 billion a year toward climate finance and still be left with $412 billion to spend at home. China, India, the United Kingdom, and Brazil follow the same pattern.
This is the core message of our climate finance slider tool. Taxing extreme wealth and curbing tax abuse does not pit climate justice against development. It enables both. The interactive tool shows how much countries could raise and how much they could contribute if tax rules were rebalanced in favor of people and planet.
So why are countries still acting like climate finance is unaffordable?
The answer lies in decades of eroded tax sovereignty. Countries have signed away their taxing rights through outdated and unfair treaties, allowed wealth to flow into secrecy jurisdictions, and catered to corporate demands for tax cuts and incentives—often under conditions of debt dependence and economic coercion. In the process, governments have weakened their ability and willingness to tax those most responsible for fuelling the climate crisis.
Today, 61% of countries were found to have an “endangered” level of tax sovereignty or worse—meaning they are failing to collect tax revenue worth at least 5% f what they already raise, largely from their richest households and from multinational corporations that underpay tax. Nearly a fifth of countries (19%) fall into the “negated” category, missing out on the equivalent of 15% or more of their annual tax revenue. These are not natural constraints. They are political outcomes shaped by an unequal global financial system.
Across the Global South, the consequences are particularly acute. Many governments face impossible tradeoffs—between education and adaptation, between debt service and disaster response. As United Nations independent expert Attiya Waris has warned:
Across the Global South, care and climate responses are being sacrificed to servicing debts that dwarf the funds we need for a just transition. These sacrifices reflect an international financial order that prioritises creditor claims over human and planetary well-being.
Climate finance cannot be separated from this wider context of fiscal injustice. When governments are forced to borrow for every disaster or rely on discretionary aid pledges, they lose both agency and time. The race to build resilience becomes a race against the clock—one they cannot win without revenue.
It is time to reframe the debate. Climate finance must not rely on broken promises or voluntary pledges. It must be embedded in systems that are fair and redistributive. That means tax systems—ones that reflect both capacity to pay and responsibility for emissions.
The upcoming U.N. Tax Convention offers a once in a generation opportunity to rebalance global tax rules. If done right, it could help all countries reclaim the power to tax their richest residents and corporations fairly. It could end the era of tax havens, profit shifting, and billionaire impunity.
But we do not need to wait for negotiations to conclude. Countries can act now by introducing wealth taxes, renegotiating exploitative tax treaties, increasing transparency, and aligning fiscal policies with climate goals. These reforms are not only possible. They are popular. Polling consistently shows widespread support for taxing extreme wealth to fund public goods.
Extreme wealth fuels climate inaction, rising debt, and inequality. In a world on fire, refusing to tax those who profit most is no longer neutral—it’s a global risk.
By reclaiming tax sovereignty, governments can do what markets and private finance have failed to deliver: fund climate solutions at scale, protect the most vulnerable, and make those most responsible pay their fair share. Refusing to tax isn’t sovereignty—it’s surrender to the idea that tax is a tool for catering to the desires of the superrich, rather than a tool for protecting people’s well-being, the planet, and our collective survival.
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Study Estimates Fossil Fuel Giants Have Inflicted $28 Trillion in Climate Damage Worldwide
As people around the world cope with the worsening effects of planetary heating, "the veil of plausible deniability doesn't exist anymore scientifically" for fossil fuel giants.
Apr 24, 2025
As planetary heating has fueled increasingly damaging hurricanes, wildfires, and dangerous heatwaves, fossil fuel giants have long been shielded by plausible deniability: Despite scientists' consensus that oil, gas, and coal extraction are polluting the planet and causing global temperatures to rise, they couldn't prove that specific corporations were to blame for worsening climate destruction.
A study published on Wednesday could change that.
Using modeling techniques that have been utilized for more than a decade to explain how climate change is fueling weather disasters, researchers at Dartmouth College estimated that 111 of the world's largest fossil fuel companies have caused $28 trillion in heat-related climate damages so far—slightly less than the value of all goods and services produced in the United States last year.
"The global economy would be $28 trillion richer," reads the study, "were it not for the extreme heat caused by the emissions from the 111 carbon majors considered here."
The study, published in Nature, found that more than half of that amount—which doesn't include damages from hurricanes and other extreme climate events—could be attributed to just 10 oil, coal, and gas companies including Chevron, ExxonMobil, BP, Shell, Russia's state-owned Gazprom, and Saudi Aramco.
"Everybody's asking the same question: What can we actually claim about who has caused this?" Dartmouth climate scientist Justin Mankin, co-author of the study, told Euronews.
The researchers pursued that question as climate advocates pushed policymakers to adopt the "polluters pay principle": the idea that companies that produce pollution should pay for the damages it causes. Earlier this year, a California Democratic lawmaker introduced legislation that would allow homeowners and businesses to recoup losses caused by climate disasters like the wildfires that devastated parts of the Los Angeles area.
"The global economy would be $28 trillion richer were it not for the extreme heat caused by the emissions from the 111 carbon majors considered here."
New York and Vermont have enacted laws that would hold fossil fuel companies accountable for greenhouse gas emissions and require them to pay for climate damages and adaptation, and other states are considering similar proposals—with oil and gas companies fighting back in court.
Mankin told Euronews that Dartmouth's new research shows that "the veil of plausible deniability doesn't exist anymore scientifically."
In the past, he said, carbon emitters could ask, "Who's to say that it's my molecule of CO2 that's contributed to these damages versus any other one?"
"We can actually trace harms back to major emitters," he said.
The research team examined the final emissions of the products produced by the 111 largest fossil fuel giants and used 1,000 distinct computer simulations to determine how those emissions impacted changes in the Earth's global average surface temperature, comparing the results to a simulation in which each company's emissions did not exist.
Epidemiologist Ali Khan said the method represented "great improvements in attribution" as at least 68 lawsuits have been filed globally demanding that polluters pay for damages. About half of those lawsuits have been filed in the United States.
"So far, attorneys and litigants have often named defendants as part of the initial legal process, under the assumption that knowing a defendant's emissions is sufficient to make a claim," reads the study. "Science can help claimants assess potential defendants in a transparent and low-cost way."
The researchers determined that Chevron's oil and gas extraction has raised the Earth's temperature by 0.025°C. The company is to blame for an estimated $1.98 trillion in climate damage, behind only Saudi Aramco, which is liable for an estimated $2.05 trillion, and Gazprom, which is responsible for $2 trillion.
Kevin Reed, a professor at Stony Brook University's School of Marine and Atmospheric Sciences, told The Washington Post that Dartmouth's research into climate damage attribution is "the real deal."
"This is the first time I've seen this done in a really comprehensive way that isn't just for one specific event," Reed said.
The European Green Party cataloged a number of steps that policymakers could take if $28 trillion had been saved by forcing companies to end their climate-wrecking emissions.
Financing 100% renewable energy would cost just $4 trillion, while guaranteeing universal housing and energy efficiency would cost $3 trillion, said the political party.
"Polluters," said the European Greens, "need to start paying for the damage they are causing to our planet."
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