LONDON – The decades-old environmental mantra “Reduce, reuse, recycle” is a form of “corporate gaslighting” that shifts blame for the climate crisis from polluters to individuals, according to a new analysis published in The Conversation. The author a scholar-activist argues that true change requires adopting a more radical set of principles focused on systemic issues: Regulation, Redistribution, and Reparations.
The core critique states that corporate public relations campaigns have successfully convinced the public to focus on their personal environmental footprint, thereby distracting them from structural, policy-driven change that would threaten corporate profits.
The analysis highlights that emissions under the average person direct control account for less than 20% of total global emissions. The majority comes from industrial systems and infrastructure. To underscore this point, the author notes that even during the 2020 COVID-19 lockdowns, when individual consumption plummeted, global emissions fell by only 8%, a drop that was “nowhere near enough” to reach net-zero goals.
The author contends that focusing heavily on personal actions risks stigmatizing individuals as “environmental sinners” while ignoring the fossil-fueled economic system driving the crisis.
The New ‘Three Rs’: Systemic Solutions
The analysis proposes three new, radical principles to tackle the root causes of the ecological crisis, moving beyond the individualistic focus to demand systemic change:
• Regulation: This principle calls for putting in place strong, enforceable rules to rein in destructive industries and hold elites accountable. The argument is that decades of voluntary corporate pledges have failed. Research supports this, as nearly 75% of 23,200 companies studied had no official climate transition plans to end greenhouse gas emissions. Fossil fuel companies, for example, continue to invest vast sums in new oil, gas, and coal production despite warnings of climate catastrophe.
• Redistribution: This calls for shifting wealth and resources away from wealthy and destructive industries toward a more socially and ecologically just future. This could be achieved through progressive taxes on wealth, pollution, and financial transactions to fund a just transition for workers and communities. This progressive taxation is especially key in deeply unequal nations like South Africa, where 10\% of the population owns more than 80\% of the wealth. Redistribution is essential for ensuring the benefits of climate action reach those most affected by the crisis.
• Reparations: Recognizing that today ecological crisis is rooted in centuries of colonial extraction and exploitation, this principle demands debt cancellation, technology transfer, and climate finance from wealthy polluting nations. These funds should be provided as debt payments, not loans to nations like those in Africa, which are least responsible for the crisis but experience countless climate disasters. The author frames reparations as a “world-making project” aimed at rebuilding relationships, communities, and societies damaged by colonialism, capitalism and environmental racism.
The analysis concludes that the goal is not to stop people from recycling but to move past a narrow focus on individual actions and instead address the structural roots of the problem aligning with the rallying cry, “Systems Change, Not Climate Change.”