Companies or Us? Who Bears the Weight of Sustainability?

In 2004, in an effort to get internet brownie points and arguably one of the most deceptive PR moves in the history of marketing, BP (British Petroleum) coined the term "Carbon Footprint," a metric for measuring one’s own negative impact on the environment. Albeit evil though brilliant, this masterstroke skillfully shifted the responsibility of being environmentally friendly onto consumers, letting corporations run absolutely scot-free of any presumed responsibility.

But surely, times have changed. The consumers have matured and maybe they can hold corporations accountable now and won't fall for any more silly tactics. Sike — think again. The corporate world doesn't lose so easy, and today we're plagued with the same question. Who bears the responsibility of sustainability: is it you and me, or our corporate overlords?

Before we ask that, it's worth asking whether we're actually moving toward a more environmentally friendly future, or whether all of our masturbatory virtue signaling has actually worked at all.

Start with the most important object in most of our lives: our phones. The average person spends about 35 days a year staring into dead pixels, and smartphone manufacturers love to gloat about their environmental practices — practices that quickly fall apart under a microscope. Apple, for instance, has taken a strongly anti-right-to-repair stance. Apple devices are notoriously difficult to repair once something goes wrong, and Apple regularly prioritizes swapping entire logic boards (or entire phones) over fixing something as simple as a blown fuse or transistor. Apple also makes it deliberately difficult for third-party repair shops to source the chips and schematics needed to fix these devices, pushing consumers to throw out an entire phone over a minor failure. And we, as consumers, keep rushing out to buy the latest iPhone anyway — because it's Apple. We take the abuse because it's Apple. Think different, indeed.

Hold your horses, Android fanboys — your beloved Android manufacturers aren't perfect either. Samsung has been reported engaging in the same predatory practices, locking down phone components so they can't be swapped or repaired. Zoom out and this pattern shows up everywhere. Cars, famously, "just aren't built like they used to be," and there's a little truth to that too, though I won't dive into it here.

At this point I hope we're on the same page: as a society, we're still nowhere near as environmentally responsible as we'd like to think. So who should bear the weight of that? I'd argue: not me, and not you. Not the common person. That responsibility belongs to our representatives.

In a market this saturated, littered with technical jargon designed to confuse the average consumer, it's simply not possible — or fair — to expect individual consumers to research and police every company's practices. That's the job of governments, elected by us, to form the committees that decide the best course of action and stop corporations from adopting strategies that hurt the environment. This removes the unrealistic expectation that every consumer becomes an expert auditor, and it kills the equally unfounded notion that corporations can self-regulate. It creates a loop instead: corporations answer to the government, and the government answers to the public every election cycle. Those committees need to be as close to un-corruptible as we can make them, accountable to enough other bodies that they can't quietly be bought by lobbying or under-the-table deals. What I'm describing loosely resembles the Nordic economic model, not the neoliberal one — a market regulated by the state, not one where the market reigns supreme.

Curse you, Kennedy.

Originally published at charmed-surveyor.000webhostapp.com on July 10, 2021.