If you’re trying to find someone to blame for climate change, don’t look at me. When it comes to having a small carbon footprint, I’m practically wearing pointe shoes. I last owned a car in 1979, when I moved to New York City and sold my Datsun B210—neither the company nor the vehicle even exists anymore. There I have spent the past decades getting around almost entirely by mass transit. That doesn’t mean my environmental hands are entirely clean, however—or that I don’t feel guilty for my lapses. I fly whenever I have to, I recycle only indifferently, I have not even considered making the greenest choice for my diet: going vegan.
[time-brightcove not-tgx=”true”]I’m by no means alone in my sustainability shortcomings or in feeling guilty over them. A 2021 poll in The Lancet found that 50.2% of people surveyed experience guilt over their contribution to the state of the environment as a whole and climate change in particular. Among young people, the numbers are even greater. According to the branding and social impact consultancy BBMG, 61% of those under 30 said they feel guilty about the harm they’re helping to inflict on the planet. The guilt may not be entirely misplaced—especially among higher income people in developed countries.
“If I have the privilege of benefiting from all of the ways that this modern, Western, eurocentric life has allowed us to have certain benefits, I’m also part of the problem because I engage in certain practices,” says Wendy Greenspun, a clinical psychologist who is affiliated with Climate Psychology Alliance North America, an educational nonprofit. And while feelings of guilt may be higher among younger people, according to the BBMG poll, older adults are by no means spared their particular blame. “In the older generation, [guilt is] one of the primary climate-related emotions that are going on, because it’s like, what have we done to protect future generations, our own children and grandchildren?” says Greenspun.
Read more: Climate Anxiety Is Taking Its Toll on Young People
So just how lousy should we feel—and what can we do to get over it?
Why do I feel climate guilt but others don’t?
If about half of the people The Lancet polled feel guilty, that also means that many others don’t. Certainly that ostensibly blameless cohort is not made up entirely of people who have returned to the land, raise their own crops, own no car, and take no plane trips. So how do they dodge the negative feelings associated with modern living? One way is climate denial. If you have convinced yourself that human activity does not cause climate change, you get a free moral pass to live as you choose. One 2023 study in the Journal of Business Ethics researched this question, particularly as it pertains to air travel decisions.
“The more people feel responsible for pollution and environmental problems,” says Barbara Culiberg, associate professor of marketing at the University of Ljubljana in Slovenia and the lead author of the paper, “the more they feel guilty about the impact their air travel has on the planet.”
This, the researchers found, can have a direct cause-and-effect relationship on decisions to fly or not to fly. Indeed, according to a study the authors cite, 40% of Europeans polled reported that giving up flying would be the easiest sacrifice they could make to try to heal the planet—likely because it is not something that affects their lives every day, the way curbing driving or giving up meat would.
By any measure, climate denialism is a poor way to duck culpability for humanity’s environmental messes. It defies basic truths of science and contaminates rational debate with fallacious—and disproven—arguments. But it has served the fossil fuel industry well—and that’s not the only tool Big Oil has used to try and distract society from the main drivers of rising emissions. In 2004, BP coined the term “carbon footprint” as part of a global marketing campaign, even creating a carbon footprint calculator to make people aware of their own contribution to greenhouse emissions. The idea was promoted as a way for each of us to keep our own house clean, but it allowed Big Oil to stay dirty.
So is the solution to simply shift blame from the individual back onto the industrial sector, particularly agribusiness and the fossil fuel companies?
“If people feel others are responsible, they feel less guilty,” says Culiberg. That may be a fair enough calculation to make, but Culiberg—while not encouraging people to suffer guilt—does believe that doing so lets us all off a bit easy. “Anyone can point fingers at the fossil fuel companies and say they are responsible,” she says. “But this position will not solve the problem of climate change. As long as we drive our cars and fly across the globe, the fossil fuel companies will be in business, and we are thus contributing to the problem.”
Is guilt ever a positive thing?
For an emotion that feels so bad, guilt can do a lot of good—indeed, it’s one of our most adaptive traits, helping us abide by the social contract that binds us to behave well and cause no harm to others. When it comes to climate change, this can spur people to take action.
“There can be an upside to guilt,” says Greenspun. “If we care about something and feel bad about the harms we are complicit with, it does often spur us to take mitigative action.”
“It’s OK to feel a little bit of guilt, if that means we’re going to channel that feeling into action,” says Michaela Barnett, a civil engineer and the owner of KnoxFill, a bulk sales business that seeks to limit the use of single-use containers. “When guilt is not effective is when it consumes and paralyzes us.”
Read more: How To Encourage More People to Talk About Climate Change
That happens more than we might think. As Barnett wrote in a 2023 article for Behavioral Scientist, unresolved environmental guilt can lead people into a spiral of hoarding recyclables, worrying over the finer points of organic certifications, upending their diet, eschewing most toiletries, and even agonizing over whether its ethical to have children, adding one more little body to the global weight of humanity.
Personalizing the environmental problem this way can be a very good thing from industry’s point of view—taking the heat off the big companies and putting it on consumers instead.
Once the idea of a carbon footprint entered the zeitgeist, for example, “people became very stuck on this idea that it’s my personal responsibility,” says Greenspun. “That is really misguided. It doesn’t mean we shouldn’t all try to do our part, and that can be helpful in alleviating some level of guilt, but it also takes the responsibility away from the larger corporations that are really responsible.”
So what steps should we take?
By all means recycle. Drive less. Rethink your meat-centric diet. None of that does any harm, and all of it—in its own small, retail way—can help nudge the carbon needle the tiniest bit. It may also ease the guilt a little. But don’t stop there.
It’s important to think about individual action in the context of inspiring collective change. No single one of us has anywhere near the power to shape the world that industry does, but we’re not limited to our solo efforts either. Barnett urges people to try to act in more system-wide ways. Don’t just compost your food, set up a composting pilot program in your community. Don’t just quit using single-use soda bottles, encourage your workplace to install a seltzer dispenser onsite. Campaign for environmentally friendly lawmakers; organize Earth Day demonstrations. Barnett founded KnoxFill after trying to focus “on living as perfectly as I could and yelling at my husband anytime he brought single-use plastics into our home, that wasn’t really sustainable.” Her company now serves 7,000 customers, all of whom come to shop for products as diverse as turmeric, laundry detergent, and sunscreen, filling up reusable containers from bins or tubs, and returning the next week with the same containers for different products.
“The supply chain is circular,” Barnett says.
These kinds of actions ease the burden on both your conscience and the planet. You alone are not responsible for Earth’s increasingly sickly state, and you alone are not responsible for healing it. But in concert with both individuals and industry, you can help.
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