Would you advise someone to wave towels in a burning house? To bring a flyswatter to a gunfight? Yet the counsel we hear on climate change could scarcely be more out of sync with the nature of the crisis. The email in my inbox last week offered thirty suggestions to green my office space: use reusable pens, redecorate with light colors, stop using the elevator. Back at home, done climbing stairs, I could get on with other [46](1. opinions 2. options 3. opposition): change my lightbulbs, buy local veggies, purchase eco-appliances, put a solar panel on my roof. And a study released on Thursday claimed it had figured out the single best way to fight climate change: I could [47](1. swear off 2. advise against 3. allow for) ever having a child.
These pervasive exhortations to individual action – in corporate ads, school textbooks, and the campaigns of mainstream environmental groups, especially in the west- seem as natural as the air we breathe. But We could hardly be worse-served.
While we busy ourselves greening our personal lives, fossil fuel corporations are rendering these efforts [48](1. impertinent 2. irrelevant 3. inaccessible). The breakdown of carbon emissions since 1988? A hundred companies alone are responsible for an astonishing 71%. You tinker with those pens or that panel; they go on torching the planet. The freedom of these corporations to pollute – and the fixation on a feeble lifestyle response – is no [49](1. accident 2. incident 3. intent). It is the result of an ideological war, waged over the last 40 years, against the possibility of collective action. Devastatingly successful, it is not too late to reverse it.
The political project of neoliberalism has pursued two principal objectives. The first has been to [50](1. distrust 2. disenfranchise 3. dismantle) any barriers to the exercise of unaccountable private power. The second has been to erect them to the exercise of any democratic public will.
Its trademark policies are that [51](1. to 2. for 3. of) privatization, deregulation, tax cuts, and free trade deals. These have liberated corporations to accumulate enormous profits and treat the atmosphere like a sewage dump, and hamstrung our ability as individuals to plan for our collective welfare.
Anything resembling a collective [52](1. check 2. break 3. run) on corporate power has become a target of the elite. At the very moment when climate change demands an unprecedented collective public response, neoliberal ideology stands in the way. Which is why, if we want to bring down emissions fast, we will need to overcome all of its free-market mantras: take railways and utilities and energy grids back into public control; regulate corporations to phase out fossil fuels; and raise taxes to pay for massive investment in climate-ready infrastructure and renewable energy – [53](1. so 2. but 3. with) that solar panels can go on everyone’s rooftop, not just on those who can afford it.
Studies show that people who have grown up under this era have indeed become more individualistic and consumerist. Steeped in culture telling us to think of ourselves as consumers instead of citizens, as self-reliant instead of interdependent ,is it any wonder we deal with a systemic issue by turning in droves to ineffectual, individual efforts?
Of course we need people to consume less and innovate low-carbon alternatives build sustainable farms, invent new batteries, spread zero-waste methods. But individual choices will most count when the economic system can provide viable, environmental options for everyone not just an affluent or intrepid few.
If affordable mass transit isn’t available, people will commute with cars. If local organic food is too expensive, they won’t opt out of fossil fuel-intensive super-market chains. If cheap mass produced goods flow endlessly,they will buy and buy and buy. This Is the deception of neoliberalism: to persuade us to address climate change through our pocket-books, rather than through power and politics.
Eco-consumerism may [54](1. expire 2. expiate 3. exterminate) your guilt. But it’s only mass movements that have the power to alter the trajectory of the climate crisis. This requires of us first a resolute mental break from the spell cast by neoliberalism: to stop thinking like individuals.
The good news is that the impulse of humans to come together is inextinguishable – and the collective imagination is already making a political come-back. The climate justice movement is blocking pipelines, forcing the divestment of trillions of dollars, and winning support for 100% clean energy economies in cities and states across the world. New ties are being made to Black Lives Matter, immigrant and indigenous rights, and fights for better wages. On the [55](1. heels 2. haunches 3. hairs) of such movements, political parties seem finally ready to defy neoliberal dogma.
So grow some carrots and jump on a bike:it will make you happier and healthier. But it is time to stop obsessing with how personally green we live and start collectively taking on corporate power.
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