Principle 11: Demand Accountability
Organizations are not only collections of individuals; they also respond to the collective demands of those on whom they depend for survival. One of the individual actions that a person can take is to insist that the groups of which they are a part (for example, local, state, and federal governments; businesses; social groups; educational and financial institutions) engage in the kinds of science-consistent action required to create a sustainable future.
The oil giant BP created a calculator to allow individuals to determine their carbon footprint. “Find out your #carbonfootprint with our new calculator & share your pledge today!” read the 2004 appeal (Yoder 2020). “Worrying about Your Carbon Footprint Is Exactly What Big Oil Wants You to Do,” read a 2021 headline in an essay in The New York Times about corporate efforts to redirect responsibility for climate change from them to individuals (Schendler 2021).
Example 1: Reaching audiences in an unanticipated venue
Dr. J. Marshall Shepherd is an international expert in weather and climate, a past president of the American Meteorological Society, director of the University of Georgia’s Atmospheric Sciences Program, and host of the Weather Channel’s Weather Geeks podcast. For twelve years he worked as a research meteorologist at NASA-Goddard Space Flight Center and was deputy project scientist for the Global Precipitation Measurement mission.
But none of those distinctions are foregrounded either in his podcast or in his regular columns in Forbes, a conservative business outlet. “I am unapologetically a supporter of electric vehicles (EVs) and have thoroughly enjoyed mine,” he wrote in the March 10, 2022, issue. “It has eradicated my gasoline bill, and my home power bill has not significantly changed thanks to my power company’s EV rate. I ride in the toll lanes in Georgia without fees and will claim my tax rebate this season.”
The title of his piece (“Electric Vehicles Don’t Have to Be Elitist—They Can Erode Social Inequities”) telegraphs that its argument is not one that a reader would ordinarily expect to read in a conservative outlet (Shepherd 2022a). Shepherd argues that “tax breaks and other incentives will be required to address the inequity issues associated with income gaps based on race, class, geographic region and so forth.” He notes with approval that the 2021 “Build Back Better” bill “included tax incentives for the purchase of new or used EVs,” praises the emergence of EV sharing programs and resource groups such as EVHybridNoire, and applauds the city of Pittsburgh’s 2070 Mobility Vision Plan for including the principle that mobility justice should “redress the infrastructure racism of the past.” Pittsburgh’s plan “‘provides an equity-driven lens for infrastructure investment and maintenance to bring all neighborhoods to a good state of repair.’ To achieve its goal of a 50 percent reduction of transportation emissions by 2030 (80 percent overall by 2050), the plan calls for public charging stations (row and off-street parking), induction charging on public streets, and other strategies to remove barriers to charging” (Shepherd 2022a). As for cost, Shepherd quotes an expert who recounts that preowned EVs are relatively inexpensive, in some cases selling for as little as $6,000.
The need:
Increase public pressure on all types of organizations to take steps needed to create a sustainable future.