My coffee tastes like paper? As I pick the bits of soggy cardboard out of my teeth, I look for someone to blame. Is it the government’s fault? These things usually are. My eyes dart around the hip coffee shop and to my horror people seem—proud? Have I awoken in a dystopian nightmare, induced by our collective material obsession? No. This is the product of cramming liberal talking points into an illiberal framework.

Over the years liberals have completely conceded to the argument of personal responsibility in the way we talk about the problems of our time and the way we live our lives in response to these problems. This is best exemplified by man-made global warming. Over the years we’ve been told to avoid waste and recycle, turn off the lights, and make a thousand more “easy” lifestyle changes. But this is not really about the straws nor bottles nor cans nor cars, this is about regulation on large companies. I saw as people lamented the burning of the Amazon rainforest, but the personal and political choices made by these same people, Elkhorn South students including myself, don’t reflect the concerns of an environmentalist. 

I am assuredly a part of the global warming problem. I drive my car around with no destination, just for fun, I barely recycle, and worst of all, I use plastic straws with reckless abandon. But to what degree is it my fault? It is easy to look around and criticize my peers for their carbon footprint, in driving cars, in eating meat, and in not believing decades of leading climatology. But this is not the real problem. We have failed to address this problem with any form of liberal action. Companies have effectively tricked the public square into having discussions of individual change that shift the burdens off of them, by supporting candidates who deny climate changes very existence and go further in peddling this myth of personal responsibility. If you care about the gradual destruction of the Amazon rain-forest, leading to the blaze that caught the world’s attention, then you have to care about the deconstruction of the United States’ inter-agency efforts to combat  rain-forest deforestation by the Trump Administration. You should care about the efforts of the State Department to work with Jair Bolsenaro of Brazil in protecting native lands and the unique ecology of the Amazon. You should care about the ways that the Trump Administration has drastically underfunded these efforts and have lent very little of their clout to stopping the extractivism that is rising in places like Brazil where nationalism and populism have taken root in a way that will prove very destructive for the environment.

When problems have layered responses that involve diplomacy and regulation, it becomes very easy for us to become bored, complicit, or overly-simplistic. That is the appeal of the paper straw, a small, manageable change that makes people feel responsible, as though they have checked some sort of box for environmentalism in the way they live their lives. This doesn’t mean anything, besides a superficial commitment to prevent the end of times. Whether your straws are paper, or metal, or anything but nice, crunchy plastic, I can almost guarantee that you don’t support the radical change needed to reverse the immense threat before us now. 

Very few support the actions taken by the Green New Deal, even fewer support breaking apart companies that pollute the world. 71% of the world’s pollution comes from just 100 companies, who have faced very little accountability for this fact. We could reshape the future of the our generation, but this won’t come from inaction, or personal action. It must come through enormous grassroots support for radical policies. I don’t need to remind you of the doom and gloom that will occur in our lifetimes if we don’t act now. It has painted our headlines for decades, each year sounding more and more dire. We can turn back the clock, but it is going to be difficult. There are innumerable sums of treasure invested in keeping structural change at bay, innumerable high-paid lawyers, boardrooms, and lobbyists invested in their own interests over the our shared future. But that’s ok. I implore you to take a more active role in the world. Read about the rising sea levels, the fires in the Amazon, and a thousand other thousand year disasters that happen daily, but be skeptical of the trending, quick-fix solutions.