Kim – thank you for this thoughtful reflection. Still, I find myself deeply unsettled by the persistence of the personal responsibility frame in discussions of climate and environmental collapse. While it often comes across as a moral appeal – even a call to agency – it ends up displacing structural critique. It reframes what are, at their core, systemic failures, and in doing so turns political subjects into consumers, whose primary mode of engagement is behavioural rather than collective, political, or insurgent.

This framing isn’t benign. It’s a pillar of what’s often called neoliberal environmental governance – a regime that shifts the costs of ecological destruction onto individual lives while leaving the structures of fossil capital more or less intact. The rhetorical sleight-of-hand is subtle but powerful: rather than interrogate the logics of accumulation, extraction, and enclosure that drive climate catastrophe, we’re invited to scrutinize our diets, our thermostats, our commutes. Meanwhile, Exxon, Shell, and Suncor carry on, buoyed by subsidies, protected from meaningful regulation, and – remarkably – still welcomed as stakeholders at climate summits.

The use of “we” – as in, “we are addicted to oil” – might be intended to provoke reflection, but to my ear it flattens a landscape of radically uneven responsibility. As climate justice scholars have pointed out for years, not all emissions are equal. The vast majority trace back to a relatively small group of corporations, operating with the tacit approval – and often the direct support – of states. To insist on personal responsibility in this context is to misread the problem and, worse, to mystify its political and economic coordinates.

And it’s worth remembering that the very concept of a “carbon footprint” wasn’t developed by scientists or activists – it was introduced by BP, as part of their Beyond Petroleum campaign in the early 2000s. It was a PR strategy, a way to shift focus from extractive industry and government complicity onto individual behavior. You and I became the problem – our lightbulbs, our grocery lists, our travel choices.

But this wasn’t just branding. It helped consolidate a way of thinking – a kind of privatized environmental subjectivity, where the moral weight of planetary collapse is internalized by individuals, measured in tonnes. The fact that this logic still circulates, even among those critical of fossil capital, speaks to its staying power.

And then we arrive at Dan – the figure of ecological virtue. Fully electrified, off-grid, driving not one but two electric vehicles. Dan has done what the rest of us haven’t. He’s taken responsibility. And I get the appeal – I do. But Dan is not so much a solution as a symptom. He stands in for a certain kind of neoliberal fantasy: that we can engineer our way out of climate crisis through private optimization.

Dan’s lifestyle is possible only for those with means. His story isn’t about transformation, it’s about sovereignty – about winning, slowly and methodically, within the rules as they are. This is climate action as lifestyle branding. And it fits hand in glove with the larger neoliberal project: foreclosing collective imaginaries in favour of individualized, entrepreneurial self-fashioning. Dan isn’t a citizen in the sense of someone engaged in the polis. He’s a sovereign consumer – one with an unusually well-leveraged rebate strategy.

And most importantly: Dan’s footprint – or lack of one – has no effect on Alberta’s oilsands production forecast for 2025. That number doesn’t respond to lifestyle shifts. It reflects long-term state–industry entanglements, commodity futures, global demand, and the increasingly frantic calculus of capital accumulation in the face of ecological limits. It’s not about what we do in our kitchens. It’s about what is done in our name – often without consent, and sometimes despite resistance.

And not to put too fine a point on it, but we should also remember that a large portion of humanity doesn’t even enjoy the perverse luxury of full access to the carbon-based economy we now belatedly criticize. The global majority – disproportionately Black, Brown, Indigenous, and located in the Global South – have contributed the least to historical emissions, yet bear the brunt of their effects: flood, drought, crop failure, and displacement.

So when we talk about “our addiction to oil,” we’re invoking a universal subject that simply doesn’t exist. We’re skipping over the histories of extraction, racial capitalism, and empire – the pipelines, shipping lanes, mining operations, and military installations that built fossil modernity for some by making it unbearable for others.

Responsibility, then, needs to be scaled differently. Not inward, toward personal virtue or consumer conscience – but outward, toward solidarity, historical accountability, and structural transformation. That’s not to say responsibility has no place in the climate conversation. But we have to ask: responsibility to whom? and for what? If it remains tethered to consumer choices – to the ethics of whether we fly or recycle or buy the “right” car – then we’re stuck in the very logic that created this mess. Because the truth is: the scale of the crisis exceeds the reach of personal behaviour. It demands that we confront – and dismantle – the legal, economic, and infrastructural systems that make fossil fuel extraction not only possible, but profitable.

Responsibility, in that sense, isn’t about moral purity. It’s about building collective power to challenge what’s killing us. That means regulation, redistribution, resistance. It means naming and confronting the corporations that profit from destruction – and the governments that protect them. And it means refusing to confuse the symptoms of collapse for its source.

*****

A SCAN! member, Peter C. van Wyck, PhD, is Professor of Communication Studies, Department of Communication Studies, Concordia University, Montreal/Tiohtià:keUnceded territory of the Kanien’kehá:ka Nation.