About a week ago, I saw a post from the UW Sustainability Office that shared “6 TIPS FOR A ENERGY-CONSCIOUS NOVEMBER.” The effect was endearing — a simple message of reducing your carbon footprint and, consequently, saving the environment. It’s an idea that’s been reinforced throughout public education in Ontario with curriculums stressing the importance of making our daily actions as sustainable as possible: recycling, taking shorter showers, turning the light off, eating plant-based, driving less, etc. The post was genuinely nice to see — it was formatted well and the tips made sense. However, the post had an adverse effect that I highly doubt the post intended. It got me thinking about the Antichrist.
There is a common misconception that the Antichrist is some terrible demon that plunges the world into darkness. This, anticlimatically, is not biblically accurate. In scripture, the Antichrist refers to many individual people, specifically “whoever denies that Jesus is the Christ” (1 John 2:22 NIV), as well as those who falsely claim to be the Messiah, “perform[ing] signs and wonders to deceive” (Mark 13:22 NIV). The Antichrist might be understood less as a destroyer, but rather a deceiver that falsely claims themself a saviour via false miracles. In 2004, through a series of aggressive promotional campaigns, British Petroleum (BP) introduced the world to the idea of the carbon footprint — the false Messiah of the climate crisis.
You’ve probably heard of it. Its premise is simple: put in a few of your actions, like how much water you use, how much meat you eat, how much you drive, and a calculator spits out a number representing how much you’re contributing to planetary demise. Hooray! Now you’ll be motivated to bring the number down through small everyday lifestyle changes and save the planet. It is motivating to be able to claim that you are, in some small way, helping alleviate the climate crisis. The worst part of it is how easy it is to believe.
Let’s look at some numbers. BP’s ESG 2024 Datasheet reports responsibility for a cumulative 355.5 megatonnes of carbon dioxide equivalent emissions, a notable increase from 2023. As of the most recent data, Canadian carbon emissions sit at an annual 17.3 tonnes per capita. Assuming emissions remain static throughout a lifespan of about 82 years, the typical Canadian emits 0.0004% of BP’s annual emissions. The conclusion is clear: individual action isn’t enough for meaningful environmental action; fast, widespread action is needed on a societal level and it is neither efficient nor sufficient to try to solve the climate crisis through small lifestyle fixes. This, ultimately, brings us back to BP’s employment of the carbon footprint. Its focus on individual climate action reframes the climate crisis to make us complacent with nothing more than minimally sustainable changes, and keeps our mind away from true collective action. Furthermore, by framing the climate crisis as an individually solvable matter, the problem itself becomes individual. The world is dying because we, individually, use too much electricity, water, or food, not because of the wider causes for why these basic activities are unsustainable, and especially not because of the large oil companies polluting unfathomably large amounts every day. The impossible burden of climate change shifts from the real culprits and onto us.
It is clear to me that UW is highly aware of the need for collective eco-action. UW has been using its influence as a university to promote wide-scale sustainability across both the university and the wider community, seeking to reduce and offset its roughly 55,000 megatonnes of yearly carbon emissions to net-zero through green energy, sustainable education, environmental research, community funding, and such. This is what makes UW’s regurgitation of the carbon footprint mantra less disappointing or hypocritical, but rather, foreboding. The carbon footprint, despite its easily visible falsities and destructive effect on real climate action, has invaded the environmental lexicon so thoroughly that even well-intentioned, educated parties promote its harmful message.
The sin of the Antichrist is not necessarily in its wreaking havoc upon the world, but rather in how it averts our attention from the real saviour by pretending to be the Messiah. Though there is no one environmental “Jesus” that can bring us to environmental salvation, there are genuine solutions that are present to us right now. Decades of research and hundreds of studies have shown that a future society built entirely on renewable energy is completely feasible, even before 2050. We have the tools to build a brighter future, but to do so, we need structural change. Work, economies, politics, transportation, waste, food, and so much more needs to be reconstructed from the ground up, and while it will be a great labour, we are left with few other options. It is thus the responsibility of all those with a vested interest in protecting the environment to stay committed, refuse false saviours, and fight for action, not just individually, but systemically. Or so help us God.
