See you in hell, paper straws
The impact of an individual consumer choice is a carefully manufactured illusion.
Did you know that the entire idea of a “carbon footprint” was invented by the BP oil corporation? In 2006, the company posted a notice on its website that read, “It’s time to go on a low-carbon diet,” and included a link to a personalized carbon-footprint calculator that would allow users to “Find out how your lifestyle choices effect your carbon emissions.” Wrong use of effect, but that’s not the issue. The point, it seems worth repeating, is that an oil conglomerate created and marketed the concept, which was successfully assimilated into the cultural lexicon, of an individual carbon footprint as a calculation that indicated a person’s commitment, or lack thereof, to responsible environmental citizenship.
Is this common knowledge, the BP thing? I found that link a few weeks ago in a random Wikipedia footnote and still am reeling from it.
Why, we might wonder, would an energy company want to promote the practice of tracking one’s personal carbon output? Wouldn’t the implied goal have been reducing a person’s impact on the planet and, as a byproduct, how much energy they consume, then the aggregate energy that everyone consumes and, jumping ahead a few steps, potentially BP’s own stock price?
It’s simple: They figured out how to transfer the onus of responsibility for carbon emissions onto the individual consumer and away from the company that is actually harvesting the fossil fuel and putting it into the marketplace. So by diligently monitoring and trying to reduce our personal carbon footprints, we’re actually doing BP’s bidding — we, the consumers, make sacrifices while the company does what it has always done. It enjoys the positive PR, knowing that the chances of consumers collectively forcing their hand toward meaningful, large-scale change are laughably remote.
How many families made changes based on the calculations produced by BP’s carbon-counting tool? Conversely, how much goodwill did BP generate for itself by projecting the image of environmental responsibility even though its very existence is based on the extraction of nonrenewable resources and the subsequent production of carbon emissions? It’s like whenever Facebook would loudly tout new privacy features, acknowledging users’ legitimate concerns and proclaiming itself a responsible guardian of everyone’s personal data while the company’s entire business model is still premised on precisely the opposite of the position it would be publicly expressing.
This bullshit works. I still think about how much carbon I’m producing as an individual more so than the economy that facilitates and necessitates that carbon output or the entities that profit from it. According to this narrative, everything will get better if I, the consumer, just behave more responsibly within the confines of the system I otherwise have no control over.
Recently I received an email from DTE Energy, shown above, containing my “Home Energy Report” for the previous month. It informed me that my house used slightly fewer “therms” than average for my region of the country, but that our gas use was still outside the “Efficiency Zone” by 5 percent — whatever the hell that means. It then provided a series of tips that might reduce our gas consumption, such as using insulation and lowering the thermostat (big if true).
Again, the company selling me the gas is telling me how to use less of it. Why? Same answer: Because they’re obviously not going to change anything about the way they do business or how their energy is sourced…but I can change how much of it I consume! The responsibility for environmental stewardship is successfully offloaded onto my shoulders while DTE burnishes its reputation as an energy provider that cares about the planet, all for the price of an automated email.
I’m sorry, but the turtles can eat my ass
I was doing digital marketing for a chain of burger restaurants and beer bars in the late 2010s when the video of the sea turtle with a plastic straw stuck in its nose was going viral, and a campaign called Skip the Straw started getting attention in response, as part of a larger pushback against single-use plastics. Starting that summer, several cities and states passed laws restricting the use of plastic straws, and major companies including Starbucks, McDonald’s, American Airlines and Aramark began phasing them out. We already served compostable drinking straws, but interest in the industry was quickly turning toward another new alternative: the paper straw, which unlike its plastic cousin was produced from renewable resources and was thus biodegradable.
The feedback from the field, however, was unanimous: this was a subpar product. The backlash had nothing to do with the “woke” coding that paper straws would later acquire. The more tangible issue was that they fell apart in people’s drinks. They tasted like wet cardboard. They didn’t work as well as plastic in their advertised function of transferring liquid from a glass into a sucking human mouth. Perhaps they got better, but six or seven years ago, the technology wasn’t there. Every time someone received a beverage with a paper straw before about 2020, it was a race against the clock before it became a soggy, useless mess.
For some diners, the minor unpleasantness of the experience might have been worth it for the fleeting satisfaction of doing something, literally anything, to help nudge the marketplace toward more sustainable practices. We won’t know if that ever would have worked. To the surprise of absolutely nobody, and to the delight of all the heinous people you’d expect, President Trump this month signed an executive order banning the federal purchase of paper straws, declaring: “We’re going back to plastic straws.”
This is less of a blow to the left than he probably imagines, because it presumes that even a single person on Earth, liberals included, enjoyed using the straws and will miss them.
The problem was deeper than functionality. Applying some basic scrutiny created an environmental case against using paper straws that was at least as persuasive as the case for them. The downsides are widely reported and easily searchable: They are more expensive to produce than conventional drinking straws and are thus more resource-intensive. The glues and dyes used in many paper straws have additives that make them less safe for humans than their plastic counterparts. They contain more “forever chemicals,” including PFAS, than plastic straws. Their life cycle might actually produce more carbon per capita than that a typical common plastic straw. Many types of paper straws are not even recyclable. Also worth considering: What is the combined BP-branded “carbon footprint” of all the electricity used to write internet articles about the straw “discourse”?
Paper straws are a case study in the futility of “green materialism” — the idea that we can reverse or substantively delay the effects of climate change by choosing, as individual consumers, to buy versions of common products that are more sustainably manufactured. As the Atlantic’s Annie Lowery explained in 2019, green-er is not the same thing as green:
“Paper straws put the lie to the belief that we can consume our way out of the problems created by consumerism. Replacing certain forms of consumption with other, marginally better forms of consumption is not going to save the planet.”
This is not unique to straws. For instance, you have to use a paper shopping bag 43 times, or a cotton bag 50-150 times before either becomes a more eco-friendly alternative to a single plastic bag. There is even research that suggests “buying green” is actually harmful because it lulls consumers into the false sense that they are contributing to the planet’s wellbeing, which can make people less likely to participate in meaningful collective action, and more likely to continue buying things they know are harmful because they think other purchases cancel that behavior out.
There is also anecdotal research, by me, that suggests trying to get a simple answer to a question like “should I purchase products that are marketed as sustainable?” opens up such a maddening hall of mirrors that I’ve basically collapsed in despair over the idea that things will get better if I, the solitary consumer, assume responsibility for incrementally changing the marketplace through my own actions. As if the forces impeding that change aren’t so immutable as to be almost cosmic in scope. But the industries profiting from the plastics supply chain, and every other lane of the fossil-fuel economy, want us to think our choices matter just as badly as activists do. Because if the individual is the one with that power, then the industries themselves don’t actually have to do anything until a critical mass of consumers demands it.
‘Personal lifestyle alterations’
The most infuriating quote in the AP’s story about the executive order on straws wasn’t any of Trump’s usual belligerent nonsense. It was the response from the Turtle Island Restoration Network advocacy group, which said in a statement: “To prevent another sea turtle from becoming a victim to plastic, we must make personal lifestyle alterations to fight for these species.”
Oh, must we? That statement might as well have been written by a plastics manufacturer. It is the same as BP telling individual consumers to “go on a carbon diet.” Sure, we’ll change, if you, the consumer, transform your own life and force us to follow along. So with every other blinking-red, extinction-level, fall-of-the-Weimar-Republic emergency screaming for attention inside my skull right now, I’ll get right on that personal lifestyle alteration, for the fucking turtles.
The New York Times opinion section recently published a grim essay by Alexander Clapp, the author of Waste Wars: The Wild Afterlife of Your Trash, describing the mayhem and carnage American garbage and supposedly recyclable refuse creates across the globe. It tells of hazardous chemicals from the West filling ravines in Africa, beaches in the Caribbean and swamps in Latin America. Cities in Ghana and warehouses in Mexico overflow with the remains of American cell phones and dead car batteries. “Hellscapes of imported Western waste, stacked knee-high as far as the eye can see” cover the Indonesian island of Java. And the solution is that I need to make personal lifestyle alterations?
Say that the next time I go out to eat, I do the responsible thing and decline the straw. I’m still sitting at a restaurant whose primary supply chain is the system of industrialized animal slaughter that accounts for somewhere between 10 and 20 percent of the world’s greenhouse gas emissions, including 65 percent of nitrous oxide emissions, and which uses 70 percent of the agricultural land on the planet. I still rode to the restaurant in a vehicle that burns gasoline, to enter a building that is lit and air-conditioned and powered by the consumption of fossil fuels, and which was built using unsustainable equipment and materials on natural land that had been cleared of plant and animal life for that purpose. I would still be wearing clothing that was shipped across the planet after being sewn by children working under grotesque conditions in a country experiencing climate disasters exacerbated by Western consumption. I would still be making a reservation, ordering and paying using electronic devices and processes far more environmentally destructive than my abstinence from straws could even come close to offsetting.
Our “choices” exist within a narrow context whose built-in effects overwhelmingly dwarf whatever positive impact any specific single decision might produce. It’s a hopeless feeling, but that’s kind of the vibe these days.
‘This is your problem’
One of the most interesting moments from the 2020 presidential campaign happened during a climate-change forum hosted by CNN. The push to eliminate plastic drinking straws came up in a conversation between anchor Chris Cuomo and Sen. Elizabeth Warren, then a candidate for the Democratic nomination. He asked her about a related issue: energy-saving light bulbs, which Trump, still president at the time, was attempting to ban. He said: “Do you think the government should be in the business of telling you what kind of light bulb you should have?”
Warren gave an impatient sigh and calmly torched the premise of the question:
“Oh, come on. Give me a break. There are a lot of ways that we try to change our energy consumption and our pollution, and God bless all of those ways. Some of it is with light bulbs, some of it is on straws, some of it, dang, is on cheeseburgers, right? There are a lot of different pieces to this, and I get that people are trying to find the part that they can work on and what they can do. And I’m in favor of that, and I’m going to help and I’m going to support.
“But understand, this is exactly what the fossil fuel industry hopes we’re all talking about: ‘This is your problem.’ They want to be able to stir up a lot of controversy around your light bulbs, around your straws and around your cheeseburgers, when 70 percent of the pollution, of the carbon that we’re throwing into the air, comes from three industries….Think about that. We don’t stop at 70 percent, but that’s what we focus on. And why do we focus there? It’s corruption. It’s these giant corporations that keep hiring PR firms…so we don’t look at who’s still making the big bucks off polluting our Earth.”
The entire debate over light bulbs, straws, etc., as Warren explains, is merely a ruse obscuring what really happens inside that proverbial smoke-filled boardroom. It’s such an obvious misdirect: Here, you can all keep fighting about your choices of light bulbs and straws as if that will ever disrupt the extraction of fossil fuels, the commodification of energy and the production of carbon emissions, and we’ll keep turning the invisible gears as usual, buying politicians, globalizing the supply chain and subjecting the habitability of our planet to the requirements of the shareholder economy.
The rest of us are just the Anne Hathaway character in The Devil Wears Prada, who thinks she grabbed a random blue sweater from a clearance rack because she doesn’t care about fashion, when in fact a series of well-coordinated decisions far beyond her comprehension put that sweater in front of her and made her think she was choosing to buy it:
“That (sweater) represents millions of dollars of countless jobs, and it’s sort of comical how you think that you’ve made a choice that exempts you from the fashion industry when, in fact, you’re wearing a sweater that was selected for you by the people in this room… from a pile of ‘stuff.’”
Her point? There’s no such thing as consumer choice. And that sweater by now is under a mountain of discarded American clothing piled somewhere in the Atacama desert.