Climate change is an incredibly complex intersection of topics that include economics, atmospheric & earth science, energy policy, personal behavior, morals, political science, technology, engineering and many more disciplines. When faced with a complex problem, we often create simplified models to help us evaluate our actions. The stories we create are helpful and necessary; but often these same stories can oversimplify a situation and even mask how the world actually operates.
Developing effective strategies to reduce emissions requires that we bring in a broad understanding of these different topics. When we oversimplify our mental map of who causes greenhouse gas emissions we can focus on solutions that are extremely difficult to achieve (like believing members of Congress will pass meaningful climate legislation) or solutions that are naive (like believing that corporations will do the right thing and reduce emissions on their own.) And some simple solutions hide actions we can take today, in our own lives, to contribute to a solution.
At the core of the problem is our dependence on fossil fuels as a source of power. When we burn fossil fuels for energy we release carbon dioxide into the atmosphere. This has caused the concentration of carbon dioxide in the air around the entire world to increase from around 285 ppm before the industrial revolution to over 425 ppm - an increase of almost 50% over the entire atmosphere. To mitigate the worst future impacts of climate change, we need to significantly reduce our emissions of carbon dioxide. Not just slow the increase, but radically decrease our emissions. A rather straightforward directive.
But it has proven difficult to shift away from burning fossil fuels.
How we get through each day is intertwined with the economic, social, cultural and legal systems related to using fossil fuel. Changing these systems takes time and sustained effort. Changing these systems also triggers defensive actions by actors who benefit from our current system:
Corporations (private, public or government owned) that find, extract, process, transport and sell the fuels
Corporations that make and sell the devices that use fossil fuels, like cars, trucks, air planes, power plants, furnaces, and steel mills
Governments that allow and regulate the extraction, processing and sale of fuels while taking tax revenue from the process, and that are massive users of fossil fuels
People acting on their own or acting as employees or owners of corporations or as investors who directly burn fossil fuels in cars, furnaces and hot water heaters or who rely on the output of burning fossil fuel for air travel, electricity consumption or buying groceries
In the United States of America, we have been talking about how to shift these systems to reduce our emissions for most of my life.
Forty-one years ago, Dr. Carl Sagan testified to warn Congress about the dangers of the greenhouse effect and human-induced climate change, and 38 years ago Dr. James Hansen testified in the US Senate Committee on Energy and Natural Resources presenting computer modeling scenarios from the NASA Goddard Institute for Space Studies that projected global temperature trends decades into the future. (Both linked videos are worth watching.) Scientists have put forward compelling and digestible overviews of the science and the projected impacts. Yet in the United States we have failed to pass a legal framework limiting greenhouse gas emissions. And while our emissions have come down, we still have higher per-person emissions than most other countries.
While Congress has known about climate change for over 40 years. The most engaged corporations, like Exxon, understood climate change well before that. It is not reasonable to hold out that either Congress or private corporations will be the first to change. Yes, we need to work on changing both the laws and the markets related to burning fossil fuels - but these take time we have already squandered.
Climate change is a particularly obstinate problem because the actions of billions of individual people drive our emissions and result in a shift in our climate. Each individual has incomplete knowledge and conflicting needs related to their own interests. And the actions of any individual can seem to create an immeasurably small change in our emissions - up or down. It is hard to internalize that our actions directly contribute to the problem.
It’s easier to construct stories about amoral corporations and incompetent governments than about personal responsibility. And we fail to see that multiple stores may be true at the same time. We simplify the complex system and develop stories or mental models that help us understand our world. Often filling in gaps in our knowledge by simply making stuff up in a process psychologists call confabulation.
One of the incorrect models we built, and that we frequently use, is that “corporations are responsible for climate change, which means I am not.” Sometimes this is modified to “government action will solve climate change so I don’t need to change.” Or maybe that “climate change is not a real problem so I don’t need to change.”
This is on full display in our media.
On the right, solar, wind and battery storage are viewed with extreme skepticism, while increasing the production of fossil fuels in America is a national defense priority. And our transition to electric vehicles is presented as a failed experiment.
On the left, vilification of corporations and a hyperfocus on government regulations is the preferred solution. This is exemplified by coverage in The Guardian that repeatedly tells us that a small handful of corporations have caused over half the greenhouse gas emissions to date. Their January 2026 article stated that “Just 32 fossil fuel companies were responsible for half the global carbon dioxide emissions driving the climate crisis in 2024.” So the automobile manufacturers are not responsible for the emissions from the cars they manufacture, and the drivers of those cars are not responsible when they buy the gasoline and burn it, but the corporations that produced, processed and placed the oil and gas into commerce are responsible. And the same for corporations that produce natural gas furnaces, or the people using them - as opposed to the firm that extracted the natural gas and sold it to me so I could burn it to stay warm. We hold to these stories even though these oil and gas firms did not burn the fossil fuels nor emit the carbon dioxide.
The reality is more complex. And until we look past the simple solutions with a story line that suggests we do not, individually, each need to change, we won’t meaningfully cut our emissions.
Reducing emissions does involve changing our personal behaviors. Even if we get congress to pass laws, these laws will simply need to prohibit us from actions like continuing to buy internal combustion engine vehicles, flying whenever we can afford it, or eating significant portions of beef.
Yes, we need new laws and we need to lobby and advocate for legislation. Yes, we need to change corporate behavior which can be influenced by new laws, by our purchases, and by our investing choices. But the action that is fully in our control today is acting to reduce our own emissions.
And from a starting point of taking personal actions, we can ask our legislators to help us. For instance writing laws requiring that our electric utilities transition away from fossil fuels since we have given these corporations regulated monopolies and there are no market choices available. And we can help corporations understand that they are simply no longer going to make money selling us the goods and services we don’t buy - like internal combustion engine vehicles, hamburgers, poorly insulated houses, and Caribbean cruises.
Yes, we need better laws. Yes, we need corporations to cut their emissions.
And, today, immediately, we can examine our lives and change those elements totally in our control - our actions.
It’s important to avoid oversimplifying climate action into a focused, narrow window for action and explore how shifting actions, shifting norms, shifting laws and shifting markets can all work together to reduce emissions.
It is also important to avoid any assumption that individual actions alone will sufficiently cut our emissions. We need individual change and systemic change. The one clear differentiation is that we can take individual actions without any new laws and without new products being developed. It is an area completely in our control. And individual action will help foster systemic action through shifts in markets and shifts in social norms as well as through an improved position for advocacy when seeking legislative remedies.
To explore your personal actions, continue reading the six disciplines for a climate concerned consumer.
Jim
Not to mention the main motivator for most folks, our dependance on oil is wrecking our economy now Listening to the lies of our political "leadership" is hazardous to your wallet, never mind the threats to life.