How many times have you been told to recycle your can of Coke? Or buy a hybrid? Or seen a politician take money from oil companies while advocating for environmental policy? Over the past decades, corporate leaders have intentionally reprogrammed the way we think about the individual’s role in combating climate change. We are told time and time again that climate change is a result of individual actions: we consume too much, recycle too little, and live too long. As a result, Americans have succumbed to the notion that we can mitigate climate change without fundamentally restructuring corporate America, a sentiment that pins blame on consumers and distracts us from advocating more seriously for corporate reform.

It’s no secret that corporations rely on profits to survive. Corporations, then, will do everything in their power to distract their customers from a business model that relies on environmental degradation to turn a profit. Worse yet, many go as far as to place the blame of their waste on the consumer. If shifting the blame costs less than taking responsibility for one’s actions, a profit-motivated industry can and will choose the former. 

Think of the “Keep America Beautiful” campaign. Funded by plastic manufacturing companies worried about the rise of knowledge about the harmful effect of plastic waste, “Keep America Beautiful” campaigned for Americans to be more mindful of their litter. Rather than revert back to a system in which glass bottles could be returned to the manufacturing companies for recycling, profit-motivated manufactures stuck to their system of producing non-reusable, easily disposable plastic bottles. The problem was, public opinion showed that many Americans were unhappy with the amount of wasted plastic manufacturing produced. As a result, plastic manufacturers worked to shift away the blame of this waste onto the consumer. What these manufacturers came up with was “Keep America Beautiful,” a campaign that pinned individual-caused litter as the main culprit of plastic waste. Slogans such as “In the fight against litter and pollution, we still have so far to go,” and “Get involved now, pollution hurts all of us,” distorted our view of the issues. Consequently, plastic manufacturing companies face little to no consequences for their generated waste. The effects of the Keep America Beautiful campaign remain significant even today. Whether its plastic bottles or dental floss, the individual responsibility rhetoric persists in advertisements and public discourse. When we allow corporations to pin their pollution on the consumer, the scope and scale of regulations on plastic manufacturing will remain limited.

ExxonMobil’s campaign against climate policy in the 1980s serves as another example of the power of corporate lobbying and marketing. According to an eight-month investigation conducted by Inside Climate News, climate researchers alerted ExxonMobil to the possible consequences of burning fossil fuels in the late 1970s. As a business founded on the burning of fossil fuels, ExxonMobil swiftly took action, conducting their own independent research into the environmental impact of fossil fuels.

ExxonMobil’s independent study came to the same results: “doubling of the carbon dioxide blanket in the atmosphere would produce average global warming of three degrees Celsius, plus or minus 1.5 degrees C.”  Despite this knowledge, ExxonMobil at first failed to act on these findings. Just as concerns about global warming were creeping into the attention of government officials and the public, Exxon “started financing efforts to amplify doubt about the state of climate science.” Over the coming years, ExxonMobil spent millions of dollars lobbying against carbon emission controls. In 1988, Exxon set up the Global Climate Coalition (GCC), a lobbying group comprised of oil and automobile companies “dedicated to defeating controls on carbon pollution.” Ten years later, Exxon helped create the Global Climate Science Team, a group of lobbyists who vehemently denied any human influence on climate change. In 2000, Exxon paid for ads which “accused MacCracken’s office of putting the political cart before a scientific horse.”

ExxonMobil’s senior director for federal relations Keith McCoy quite literally admitted to anti-environmental lobbying efforts in a recent Greenpeace investigation. In the undercover interview, McCoy makes some damning remarks in a cartoon-villain style rambling of the company’s lobbying history. 

“Did we aggressively fight against some of the science? Yes. Did we join some of these shadow groups to work against some of the early [climate advocacy] efforts? Yes, that’s true. But there’s nothing illegal about that. We were looking out for our investments. We were looking out for our shareholders…”

If this statement isn’t enough evidence for you, try watching the entire interview. Keith McCoy admits – almost comically – to nearly all of ExxonMobil’s wrongdoings in one fell swoop. Why would he willingly divulge this information? He thought he was being headhunted for another corporate executive position.

Rather than using their resources to conduct research into more environmentally friendly forms of electricity, ExxonMobil found it more profitable to manipulate government and public opinion. These actions were entirely driven by profit. Exxon found it more efficient to spend millions on lobbying, advertising, and endorsements rather than creating a more sustainable business model. Lenny Bernstein, an executive climate researcher at ExxonMobil for about 30 years, alludes to this fact in an email to the professional ethics department at Ohio University. In the email, Bernstein says: 

“Corporations are interested in environmental impacts only to the extent that they affect profits, either current or future. They may take what appears to be altruistic positions to improve their public image, but the assumption underlying those actions is that they will increase future profits. ExxonMobil is an interesting case in point.” 

Bernstein’s message indicates that when driven by profit – and only profit – corporations will go to any length to lower their costs and protect their revenue. ExxonMobil used their resources to sow doubt into the minds of millions of Americans and policymakers, and they did so successfully. As a result of these campaigns, “[Climate skepticism is] substantially higher among political conservatives in the U.S. Indeed, it seems accurate to say that right-leaning Americans largely account for the United States’ outlier status on climate change views in cross-national comparisons,” says climate and public opinion expert Aaron McCright. This skepticism has allowed the “right-wing denial countermovement [to] become institutionalized within the Republican Party.” This climate pushback from Republicans has undoubtedly contributed to why the United States seems so far behind the rest of the world on climate policy. 

So the next time you’re thinking to yourself, “how is it possible that this many people refuse to believe in climate change,” keep in mind that much of the right-wing climate denial was perpetuated, if not inspired by, the fossil fuel industry. Congress’ refusal to act on sound science – which will certainly have long term economic and humanitarian consequences – is entirely a result of its stake in the oil industry.

This great corporate marketing scheme has caused a “shift from addressing our problems collectively to addressing them individually.” American citizens have become the consumers of corporate waste, from plastic to carbon emissions and everything in between. In a sense, there is little to nothing an individual consumer could ever do (in terms of their consumption behavior)  to offset their carbon footprint. This, though, is in no way the consumer’s fault. As much as corporations would like us to believe that we’re responsible for the Great Pacific Garbage Patch or a hole in the ozone layer, it’s the corporations themselves that have created the plastic and chlorofluorocarbons that caused these issues in the first place.

Please note, the essence of this article is not to say that you shouldn’t take responsibility for your actions. You should. It will never hurt to be mindful of your plastic consumption and carbon footprint. The point is, though, that corporations have run successful campaigns to shift the blame away from their major polluting habits onto the shoulders of their consumers. Individual action is far from the end-all-be-all of climate change. We live and operate under this system, and right now, there’s nothing we can change about that. Of course, it is always important to be mindful of your interaction with the environment, but it’s up to corporations and governments to take the steps necessary to reverse the negative effects of mere existence. If we allow mega-polluters to remain in the pockets of politicians, we will never see the change that we need.

As long as we keep believing in this rhetoric, we are distracted from the real question: How can we restructure corporate America to create a more equitable and environmentally friendly system? The answer to this question is complicated and uncertain, but this knowledge alone is a powerful tool in creating change. We need to know what to fight for. We must advocate for stricter pollution and lobbying regulations to fundamentally change Congress’ relationship of Big Oil. 

So what, if anything, can we do? Vote! It’s time to elect politicians who understand the flaws in our system are who are unencumbered by Big Oil money. Recycling a plastic bag every day for your entire life isn’t going to reduce plastic waste by any significant margin, but electing a politician who bans those bags might. Spread the word, too. This might be the one individual action that matters the most. You don’t need to become an environmentalist preacher, but it’s important to keep in mind that knowledge is power. Talk to a friend, a colleague, a neighbor, or anyone willing to listen. The more people who know it’s less about behavior and more about the system, the more people will be willing to get.