Opinion piece: Fuck your own responsibility!

Fuck off with your own responsibility!

It really should be time to stop this fuss about shorter showers, paper straws and closing the tap while brushing your teeth. We'll talk about that again when Shell pays taxes on their pollution and the livestock population is at least halved.

Let me start by saying that I think it is only beautiful that people take the initiative by making sustainable choices. I try to pay attention to this myself, so you won't find me at the butcher's or in a car behind the wheel (let's forget that I don't have a driving licence either). Even if you're happy if you only flush your toilet for a big message and shower only once a week to save the environment, that's fine by me.

What bothers me is the frame that has been presented to us for years: a better environment starts with yourself. This was not just thrown out into the world, and certainly not thought up by benevolent climate activists who firmly believed that every little bit helps. No, this is something started by the big polluters, and a slogan that these companies are still very eagerly embracing and spreading.

During Milieudefensie's lawsuit against Shell, Shell kept insisting that consumers must take responsibility for solving climate change. Meanwhile, they broadcast ads in which they join forces with Staatsbosbeheer to plant trees in order to play the moral high ground, while they are still mainly engaged in oil and gas extraction and emitting nine times as much as the whole of the Netherlands.

Moreover, as consumers, we simply do not have the power to wake up superpowers like Shell and Tata Steel. Many people simply need petrol to get to work every day, so they simply cannot do without it. Especially in winter, we need gas to heat our homes. In our society, you simply cannot live without occasionally making choices that are not so sustainable. If we keep blaming each other and ourselves too much, my fear is that we will lose sight of who the real culprit is.

Now, after reading this, don't go ordering Shein's entire collection with all taps open and heaters on while wolfing down hot dogs and chicken. But I think we leftists can learn something from the indifference with which many right-wingers go through life. No matter how important you think the environment is, your own well-being is at least as important. It does not occur to me that the people who have the environment's best interests at heart sacrifice their quality of life for it, while big business whistles to tap their next billion gained on the backs of the earth and the next generation.

So no, a better environment does not start with yourself. A better environment starts with the big polluters and their cronies in the VVD.