The New Dark Age

by Ian Angus

The main character In Barbara Kingsolver’s brilliant novel Flight Behavior is Dellarobia Turnbow, whose hard life on a small Tennessee farm is disrupted by the effects of climate change. In particularly telling scene, a visiting environmentalist asks her to sign a pledge to shrink her carbon footprint. Her family should, for example, eat less red meat.

“Are you crazy? I’m trying to increase our intake of red meat.”
“Why is that?”
“Because mac and cheese only gets you so far, is why.”^[1]

Every point in his green lifestyle pledge is just as irrelevant. He tells her to invest in socially responsible mutual funds and stocks, take restaurant leftovers home in Tupperware, and fly less—this to a woman who can’t afford to travel or to eat in restaurants, and who will never play the stock market. No change that Dellarobia can make will affect the climate crisis.

That scene is fictional, but all too real. Much of what passes for green thought today views climate change and other environmental problems as failures of personal responsibility that can be solved by consuming differently. If everyone would just drive less, buy organic produce, eat less meat, save water, compost our leftovers, turn down the heat, and change our light bulbs, all would be well.

In the insightful book It’s On You, behavioral scientists Nick Chater and George Lowenstein distinguish between two competing explanations of social problems that they label i-frame and s-frame. The former stresses individual action, while the latter focuses on system change. Not surprisingly, corporate interests have strongly supported i-frame approaches.

“Corporations and whole industries that benefit from the status quo have figured out that they can effectively deflect pressure or systemic change that might threaten their business models—policy changes that might adversely affect their bottom line—by reframing problems from the s-frame to the i-frame …. knowing full well that such measures are unlikely to have much impact on the problems they ostensibly target, and hence pose little threat to the corporate bottom line….

“This is the corporate sleight of hand: point to the i-frame, act on the s-frame; rig the rules of the game but blame individual citizens for any resulting social ills.”^[2]

The most successful and deceptive version of that sleight of hand is called carbon footprint. First coined in the late 1990s, it was originally a technical concept for comparing the climate impacts of countries with different populations. It became a widely used buzz phrase in 2004, when the advertising agency Ogilvy & Mather co-opted it to greenwash the world’s second largest non-state oil company.

British Petroleum (BP) had recently rebranded itself as Beyond Petroleum, to project an environmentally friendly image.^[3] As part of that effort, Ogilvy & Mather created an enormously successful advertising campaign that shifted the blame for greenhouse gas emissions away from oil companies to individuals and families. BP spent hundreds of millions of dollars on ads carrying variations of this message:

“What on earth is a carbon footprint? Everybody in the world has one. It’s the amount of carbon dioxide emitted each year due to the energy we use. Calculate the size of your household carbon footprint, learn how you can reduce it, and how we’re reducing ours at bp.com/carbonfootprint.”^[4]

Other ads were headlined “It’s time to go on a low-carbon diet,” “Cars should eat their vegetables, too,” and “Switch on to lower carbon emissions.”

It was one of the most successful public relations campaigns ever. An immense company that operated oil wells, refineries, pipelines, tankers and nearly 19,000 gas stations worldwide, successfully shifted the blame for climate change to individual consumers. Calculating your family’s carbon footprint became a popular school project. Other companies also offered calculators, as did many NGOs and governments. Today, cellphone users can download carbon footprint apps that promise to “help you get started on your green journey by helping you be mindful of the type of food you consume, your travel, water consumption, and shopping habits.”^[5]

Paper-based or electronic, the footprint calculation is fundamentally simple: take all greenhouse gas emissions from all sources and attribute them to end consumers, then divide them up according to each consumer’s presumed usage.

The resulting numbers may be interesting, but they are irrelevant if the user can’t control the carbon content of the necessities of life—and most people cannot. A study by students at the Massachusetts Institute of technology in 2007 found that a homeless person in the United States, a person with no car who ate in soup kitchens and slept in shelters still (according to carbon footprint calculator methodology) emitted 8.5 million tons of greenhouse gas, more than twice the world average.^[6] And there was nothing that person could do about it.

The largest emissions are not under individual control. They are locked into power grids, food supply chains, buildings, transportation systems and more—systems that no individual can escape. The vast majority of the world’s population has no meaningful choice about whether the electricity that powers their homes comes from coal or wind; whether they have access to public transit or must drive cars to work; whether the food they can afford was produced by industrial agriculture. These decisions are made by corporations and by legislation that corporations have shaped.^[7] For most, a low-carbon life just isn’t possible.

As the MIT students concluded, there are “very significant limits to voluntary actions to reduce impacts, both at a personal level and at a national level.”^[8]

As environmental scholar Michael Maniates writes, the living green myth is “dead wrong, both theoretically and empirically.”

“The sad truth about lifestyle environmentalism is that the living-green options on the menu—from eschewing plastic shopping bags to eating less meat, from driving electric vehicles to flying less, from avoiding plastic straws to everything else that’s trumpeted as green—are cumulatively puny when cast against the scale and speed of current assaults on the environment. So puny, in fact, that even if everyone on the planet did their best to live green, the cumulative impact still wouldn’t be anywhere enough to offset, much less reverse, the environmental destruction that’s now unfolding at a planetary level. When purveyors of green living exclaim that every little bit helps, they’re like a doctor prescribing Panadol or ibuprofen for a life-threatening disease. Sure, it might help on the margins, but its medicinal impact is, at best, a distraction from necessary and more aggressive treatment.”^[9]

Ecofeminist Chris Cuomo makes a similar argument:

“It is an important but rarely emphasized fact that reductions that average consumers can control, such as household emissions and personal transportation, are insufficient to bring greenhouse gas concentrations down to safer levels, because household consumption and personal transportation account for a significant but minority slice of total greenhouse gas emissions worldwide…

“The options that most individuals are able to consider regarding energy and technology use are determined externally, and fossil-fuel use is woven into any household routine or local culture in ways that are very difficult to change without causing other problems. Again, power and control are relevant, for many people have little control over their general energy consumption options, such as the accessibility of public transportation, locally grown food, or renewable energy sources.”^[10]

That is not to say that all forms of personal consumption are blameless. As I wrote in Sink the Superyachts!, some very rich individuals could easily reduce their outsized emissions if they cared to, and such reductions would have a significant impact. But focusing on the everyday consumption of working people diverts attention from the real climate criminals, and blocks or delays the changes that are really needed.

Notes

[1] Barbara Kingsolver, Flight Behavior: A Novel (HarperCollins, 2012), 127.

[2] Nick Chater and George Loewenstein, It’s On You: How the Rich and Powerful Have Convinced Us that We’re to Blame for Society’s Deepest Problems (Hachette, 2026), 11, 12. Emphasis in original.

[3] BP’s posture as a friend of the environment took a major hit in 2010 when its Deepwater Horizon oil rig exploded In the Gulf of Mexico killing eleven workers and causing the largest environmental disaster in U.S. history. Investigators found that cost-cutting by BP caused the explosion: the company pleaded guilty to manslaughter and paid over $13 billion in fines. So much for reducing its carbon footprint.

[4] Julie Doyle, “Where Has All the Oil Gone? BP Branding and the Discursive Elimination of Climate Change,” in Nick Heffernan and David Wragg, eds., Culture, Environment and Eco-Politics (Cambridge Scholars Press, 2011)

[5] T.M. Amrita, “These 8 Apps Help Me Track My Impact on the Earth,” How-To Geek (website), April 24, 2025

[6] David Chandler, “Leaving our mark,” MIT News, April 16, 2008.

[7] Peter C. Frumhoff, Richard Heede, and Naomi Oreskes, “The Climate Responsibilities of Industrial Carbon Producers,” Climatic Change 132 (2015): 157–71.

[8] Ibid.

[9] Michael Maniates, The Living Green Myth, The Promise and Limits of Lifestyle Environmentalism (Polity Press, 2025), 12, 7.

[10] Chris Cuomo, “Climate Change, Vulnerability, and Responsibility,” Hypatia, Fall 2011