The Blame for the Climate Crisis: Our Collective Responsibility
Everyone has a non-environmentally friendly vice. Mine is the 1-liter Tropical Fruit Gatorade. I train 15 hours a week, and I love to come home exhausted, open the fridge, and pull out a red Gatorade that cools your brain and quenches your thirst. So, every time I went to the supermarket, I bought 6 red ones for me and 6 apple ones for my girlfriend (infected by the vice). We would justify it by saying that we then had a large container to store all the other plastic we discarded from labels, packaging, and cling film. And then those bottles were easier to handle for the people at the recycling plant.
The problem is that I train 15 hours a week, so I get thirsty a lot. So, the plastic bottles started piling up. We were drinking them down much faster than filling them with other plastics.
Six months ago, I decided to dig a little deeper into the unseen impact of our vice. For every 25 bottles of Gatorade, we consumed 160 liters of water to make that one kilogram of plastic. We used 1.9 kg of crude oil to produce it while releasing 1.9 kg CO2-eq/kg. And adding square meters of avoidable plastic waste to the already plastic-collapsed world. It was time to give it up.
Who’s really responsible for the climate crisis? Whose habits should we change to steer away from this climate catastrophe? We often point fingers at governments and industries, to politics and business owners — transportation, agriculture, and construction as the main carbon emitters in the world. We also scrutinize companies — 71% of global greenhouse gas emissions since 1988 are due to 100 companies. Just 20 of them contribute a third of all carbon emissions, with giants like Saudi Aramco, Chevron, Gazprom, and ExxonMobil leading the pack. It’s clear that countries…
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