After decades of demanding systemic change from multinational conglomerates, I have realized my ire was misplaced. The true architect of our planetary demise is sitting in a living room in Ohio, browsing Temu on an iPad with the brightness turned all the way up.
I have spent my entire career holding the powerful to account. I have attended every UN summit since the early nineties, scolding delegates in Kyoto, Paris, and Dubai. But while we were busy tracking corporate scope-three emissions and demanding accountability from multinational logistics firms, a far more sinister force was destroying the biosphere right under our noses. We have been unfairly scapegoating the fossil fuel industry for the climate crisis when the real villain is your mother, Susan, ordering acrylic sweaters on her tablet.
Recently, a wave of younger people have begun whining that their boomer parents’ relentless consumption of disposable online goods is driving them nuts. Licensed therapist Leslie Davenport weighed in on this phenomenon earlier this week, characterizing it as a generational clash when it comes to sustainable consumption. A generational clash is the kind of coddling, soft-pedaled language that got us into this mess. When a 68-year-old woman orders fourteen individually wrapped, heavily discounted silicone spatulas from a warehouse across the globe, she is not participating in a clash. She is committing a targeted ecocidal strike against the ice caps.
It is time we admitted that the global supply chain is entirely blameless in this dynamic. Take Amazon, for instance. Amazon has issued a comprehensive ESG report detailing its commitment to green infrastructure. The executives are, on paper, doing the work. But how can we expect Jeff Bezos to single-handedly engineer the environmental transition when your mother explicitly demands that a decorative ceramic frog be flown across the Pacific Ocean and placed on her porch within 48 hours? The logistics industry is merely a passive, victimized mirror reflecting the sociopathic whims of American retirees.
Last month, I had an off-the-record lunch in Geneva with the chief executive of a major fast-fashion conglomerate. He was visibly exhausted, pushing his sustainably sourced sea bass around his plate while recounting his desperate, failed attempts to pivot to a circular economy. Every time his board tries to source ethical, durable textiles, he explained, your mother logs into Shein and buys six identical polyester blouses in slightly different shades of mauve. It is deeply unfair that we continue to protest outside corporate headquarters when the true locus of evil is a split-level ranch home with a Ring doorbell.
Consider the physical reality of what this woman is demanding. To get that cheap plastic vegetable chopper to her door, a heavy-crude cargo ship must navigate the Strait of Malacca, offload at the Port of Long Beach, and transfer the item onto a diesel-belching delivery van that idles in her driveway for ten minutes. And for what? So she can put it in a kitchen drawer and forget it exists by Tuesday. The entire global shipping network, a marvel of human engineering, has been reduced to a taxpayer-subsidized dopamine drip for women wearing sensible shoes.
We have spent billions retrofitting our cargo fleet to run on green methanol, but our emissions reductions are entirely wiped out the moment a pensioner in a Florida subdivision discovers a two-for-one sale on synthetic garden gnomes.
And what of the younger generation, who claim this habit is ruining their mental health? Your hands are not clean either. You complain about your mother to licensed therapists like Davenport, likely via a telehealth portal hosted on a server farm powered by pulverized Appalachian coal. The sheer, unmitigated carbon footprint of millennial whining is a luxury we can no longer afford to carry. You think you are morally superior because you buy a branded reusable water bottle instead of a cheap mug, but you are both destroying the earth. Your mother is just doing it with better profit margins for the manufacturer.
Davenport suggests that families should navigate this conflict by setting boundaries and having open conversations about values. Once again, I am forced to be the only adult in the room. You do not have an open conversation about values with an ecological terrorist. You sanction them. If we were serious about the environment, we would stop trying to tax carbon at the corporate level and start physically barricading the local post office. We would institute a global embargo on your mother’s Discover card.
The era of blaming the oil majors is over. Chevron and Exxon are just humble energy providers trying to keep the lights on while your mother orchestrates the collapse of the biosphere, one highly toxic polyester cardigan at a time. I suggest you go to her house and unplug the router before it is too late for the rest of us.