A lot of climate change is supposedly beyond the control of individuals. This is a comforting lie peddled by people who refuse to take responsibility for their own chewing.
The planet’s vital signs are getting worse. The oceans are boiling, the ice caps are weeping, and the climate’s tipping point is no longer a dot on the horizon; it is the windshield we are currently smashing our faces against. I know this because I spent last weekend reviewing the latest Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change data while being flown on a chartered Gulfstream to a sustainability symposium in Geneva, and the numbers are unequivocal.
But as I sat in the first-class lounge on my return flight, sipping a biodynamic pinot noir and watching the tarmac radiate heat, I realized something profound. We have spent decades pointing our fingers at the wrong villains. We have blamed the multinational conglomerates. We have blamed the extraction economy. It is time we admitted the uncomfortable truth: the real reason the biosphere is collapsing is that you, the average consumer, simply refuse to stop eating.
Let us look at the facts. Last month, I had an off-the-record dinner with several energy executives following a particularly grueling Big Oil earnings call. The media had crucified them for posting a record $35 billion quarterly profit, completely missing the emotional toll that kind of capital accumulation takes on a human soul.
One executive, a lovely man who oversees deepwater extraction for Chevron, looked across the table at me, his eyes hollow with fatigue. We are doing everything we can to reach net-zero by 2080, he whispered, pushing his sustainably sourced wagyu beef around his plate. But how can we transition the grid when the general public keeps buying cheddar cheese?
He is absolutely right. When a multinational corporation flares millions of cubic feet of natural gas into the atmosphere, it is a tragic but necessary byproduct of powering the global economy. It is structural. It is systemic. But when you purchase a sliced turkey sandwich at a regional grocery store, that is an act of sheer, malicious volition. You did not have to eat that. You chose to. You looked at the fragile majesty of our only home, and you decided your mid-day hunger pang was more important than the survival of the species.
Every time a working-class family chooses to consume a caloric meal instead of simply photosynthesizing, they leave us no choice but to open another exploratory drilling field in the Arctic.
Last Tuesday, I decided to descend into the belly of the beast to witness this ecological devastation firsthand. I visited a mid-tier regional grocery store. The sheer entitlement on display was staggering. I watched a man—who, judging by his boots, likely performs some sort of physical labor—place a package of sliced provolone into his cart. He did not flinch. He did not drop to his knees and beg the atmosphere for mercy. He just tossed it in next to a loaf of enriched white bread. I wanted to shake him. I wanted to ask him if his fleeting moment of calcium absorption was worth drowning the Maldives.
Look at your carbon footprint. And yes, I am aware that BP popularized the concept of the carbon footprint to shift blame away from themselves, which I think was an incredibly savvy piece of public relations that we should all respect. The sheer arrogance of the modern pantry is staggering. You demand out-of-season produce. You demand dairy. Do you have any idea how much methane a cow produces? It is nearly a fraction of a percent of what a single fracking site leaks in an afternoon, but the cow does it smugly.
Contrast this with the quiet heroism I witnessed at COP last year in Dubai. The delegates understood the stakes. Yes, we dined on imported bluefin tuna and air-freighted strawberries, but that caloric expenditure was strictly for diplomacy. We were fueling the minds that will eventually draft the non-binding guidelines that will save us all. When a climate envoy eats a four-hundred-dollar steak, it is an investment in the transition. When you eat a four-dollar burger, it is an act of ecological terrorism.
Once again, the public expects the heroic architects of our energy infrastructure to perform miracles while refusing to make even the smallest sacrifices themselves. In corporate sustainability circles, we talk a lot about scope-three emissions, which are the indirect greenhouse gases produced up and down a company's value chain. What the activists fail to realize is that you are Big Oil's scope-three emissions. Your continued, stubborn insistence on being alive and needing sustenance is the only thing forcing these poor corporations to extract hydrocarbons. If you simply ceased your relentless biological functions, ExxonMobil could hit its emission reduction targets by next quarter.
My colleagues in the environmental movement often talk about stranded assets, warning of the trillions of dollars of unburnable carbon that oil companies will have to leave in the ground. But what about the stranded assets in your refrigerator? That leftover macaroni and cheese is a direct insult to the delegates who worked tirelessly to draft a resolution about maybe thinking about phasing out coal by the next century.
The easiest fix for our planet’s vital signs is your diet. It requires no legislation, no corporate restructuring, and no disruption to the shareholder dividends that anchor my retirement portfolio. All it requires is for you to stop treating your digestive tract like a luxury resort.
The fossil fuel industry is trying to pivot. They are investing thousands of dollars into greenwashing campaigns to assure us they are part of the solution. They are designing proprietary nutrient pastes to replace your resource-heavy meals. Shell’s new algae-based sludge is currently in beta-testing and tastes perfectly acceptable if you have lost your sense of smell, which, given the ambient air quality, you probably have.
Yet you stubbornly cling to your sandwiches. You insist on three meals a day, a decadent rhythm that is entirely incompatible with a habitable Earth. We are out of time, but go off. Until you are willing to look your children in the eye and tell them they cannot have dinner because Chevron needs the carbon budget to maintain its third-quarter growth projections, you have no right to complain about the weather.