In the past few years, we have seen an uptick in a more independent approach to climate change and its various potential solutions. This trend noticeably picked up in popularity at the start of 2020 with reusable water bottles and the public agenda of saving the turtles. Since then, we have seen both peaks and troughs in public awareness and general care towards the environment and its increasing decline. More recently, conversations around fast fashion and its negative effects on the climate have been trending on social media, with many influencers recommending thrifting and other more sustainable fashion alternatives to their audience, as opposed to buying from shops that offer cheaper garments. Such items are often manufactured in sweatshop-like conditions, thus producing poor quality clothes that only further encourage overconsumption and the quickening of trend cycles. But this climate consciousness is not as widespread as some might hope. Yes, you will see the aforementioned sustainable content on most TikTok ‘For You’ pages but most will be shortly followed by a Shein or Temu haul, where individuals unbox mountains of clothes all individually wrapped in plastic packaging. Dichotomies like this make people question just how much progress we as a society are making on tackling this climate crisis, and how much we as individuals are doing to save our beloved planet.

But I must stop and ask: how much can we, as individuals, really do to help, or even to harm, the environment? Will my reusable water bottle and second-hand shops be the thing to save the crumbling o-zone? And then, this begs the question of: was this even our fault, for the most part? Now, I should clarify that I understand the notion of ‘power in numbers’ and that these individual habits, when adopted by many, can play a significant part in the state of our environment. But we cannot ignore the elephant, or shall I say smoke cloud, in the room: large corporations and brands are causing far more damage to the climate than most people would cause in their lifetime, or even in their family’s lifetime.

Despite the Paris Agreement of 2016, in which many countries agreed to a legally binding treaty with the aims of tackling the climate crisis, global greenhouse gas emissions for 2024 were projected to be higher than ever, at 37.4 billion metric tonnes of carbon dioxide emissions, according to the Global Carbon Budget report. Sadly, this is not predicted to be the peak, and it is expected that these numbers will only continue to rise over the years. A scroll through any social media platform might leave many believing that this drastic and continuous increase is due to overconsumption and lack of climate care from the average person, but this is far from the reported truth. Since 2016, 80% of greenhouse gas emission were linked back to just 57 companies. Even with our best efforts, no one person can reverse the grave effects that this will have on our planet; no number of reusable straws or tote shopping bags can undo the damage caused by the major few. 

Moreover, the ubiquity of artificial intelligence (AI) in the 2020s has only made it more difficult for people to try and reduce their own carbon footprint. As time goes on and more advances are made, it has become almost impossible to avoid the climate monster that is generative AI – one cannot even conduct a simple Google search without being confronted by Gemini’s answers, this being Google’s own generative AI model that provides an automated response to any search without you even having to ask. Simply training one AI model has the potential to emit 626,000 pounds of carbon dioxide, yet many corporations continue to develop their own models and implement them into their daily business, without any regard for the climate consequence.

When one is aware of the emissions of these major polluters, it is hard to see how your own carbon footprint, a single drop in this overflowing, greenhouse-gas bucket, even truly matters. Yet we are still told, time and time again, that the responsibility for this climate catastrophe lies in our own two hands. As people, we can make small changes in our day-to-day lives to try and improve both the current state and future of our planet, but this shouldn’t result in decreased pressure on these major polluters. So yes, you can continue to clutch on to those reusable straws, but don’t forget to keep your eyes on the companies who are pouring more and more greenhouse gases into our atmosphere every day.

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