Catie Byrne
Features Editor 

Most, if not everyone, is aware of global warming and the ever-encroaching environmental doom of climate change. It is a slow death to this planet, it is inescapable and it is as easily observable as the daily and nightly smog in the sky people call sunrise and sunset.

And while most people have some idea as the ways in which climate change comes about — one of the greatest threats to the planet which feeds into the issue of climate change, is that people individualize the topic, rather than consider the broader, macro level causes of climate change — which are derivative of corporate mass-production.

Corporate conglomerations are pollution-producing monsters that people cannot tackle by merely tracking their own eco-footprint or recycling, they are multi-billion-dollar industries which prioritize money and making money only, and will engage in every environmentally disastrous activity from industrial chemical dumping, to producing smog and unclean energy in order to do so.

In The Guardian’s, “Just 90 Companies caused two-thirds of man-made global warming emissions,” Suzanne Goldenberg cites that, “The 90 companies on the list of top emitters produced 63% of the cumulative global emissions of industrial carbon dioxide and methane between 1751 to 2010, amounting to about 914 gigatonne CO2 emissions… [And] all but seven of the 90 were energy companies producing oil, gas and coal.”

And the problem is, precisely, money. It’s no coincidence that the companies Goldenberg lists are multi-billion dollar corporations; “The list of 90 companies included 50 investor-owned firms – mainly oil companies with widely recognised names such as Chevron, Exxon, BP and Royal Dutch Shell and coal producers such as British Coal Corp, Peabody Energy and BHP Billiton.”

And further, environmental activists do not have billions of dollars lying around, and they do not have the individual means necessary to take down these corporations. And, ironically, the very businesses which are contributing to environmental decay, are branding themselves as “clean,” in order to establish the illusion of ethical consumption.

Individual environmental activism can prove even more difficult, when one considers that the governments of various countries have actively funded the oil and coal companies which account for almost one-tenth of the total greenhouse gas emissions.

“Government-run oil and coal companies in the former Soviet Union produced more greenhouse gas emissions than any other entity – just under 8.9% of the total produced over time. China came a close second with its government-run entities accounting for 8.6% of total global emissions,” said Richard Heede, climate researcher at the Climate Accountability Institute in Colorado.

Thus, environmentally conscious people are manipulated, activists are manipulated and the general populous is manipulated into believing that whatever individual impact they are able to make, such as buying an “environmentally friendly water bottle,” is making some sort of profound environmental impact. But the problem is, there is no opting out of the consumption which inevitably feeds into the profits of the very corporations which allow them to exist and continue to rapidly destroy the planet.

This is exemplified in that, “ChevronTexaco was the leading emitter among investor-owned companies, causing 3.5% of greenhouse gas emissions to date, with Exxon not far behind at 3.2% [and] in third place, BP caused 2.5% of global emissions to date,” cites The Guardian’s Goldenberg.

Anthropologists believe that modern humans have only existed for an estimated 200,000 years on a planet that is 4.5 billion years old. Essentially, the environmental harm in which humans have incurred on a planet they have not inhabited for even one one-thousandth of its existence is a problem, and a horrifying problem at that.

However, it would be unfair to place the blame on the human as an individual, when multi-billion dollar corporations have caused more damage to the planet than any kind of “green,” lifestyle could ever repair.