In the fall of 2003, a camera crew took to the streets of London to ask people about their carbon footprint.

Nineteen years ago, people hardly knew what a carbon footprint was, let alone how much they were emitting.

But thanks to this commercial and the ad campaign that ran throughout the early 2000s alongside it, the carbon footprint has become one of the main vectors through which we view the climate crisis.

And the masterminds behind this campaign was none other than BP.

This oil giant orchestrated a multimillion dollar ad blitz in order to popularize the idea of the “carbon footprint” and place the responsibility for climate change onto the individual consumer.

The way we commonly talk about inequality and emissions is no mistake.

The fossil fuel industry has spent decades making it seem like our individual consumption habits are causing the climate crisis.

A recent analysis of Exxonmobil’s internal and external documents found that the company not only downplayed the climate cirisis throughout the last 20 years but also consistently framed it as a consumer demand problem rather than a fossil fuel supply problem, ultimately individualizing responsibility.

In part, this is why we’re so focused on the damage caused by a rich person’s flight log rather than how they got the money to pay for that private jet in the first place.

This needs to change.

When we talk about inequality and climate change we need to zoom out and understand that this is not just a question of who has money and who doesn’t and what they do with it, but a question of class–how the unequal ownership of production breeds environmental degradation.

In other words, when we talk about inequality in relation to emissions we need to focus on who controls and profits off of polluting industries.

Because for each flight taken or car driven there is an airline or fuel company and a host of executives gaining profit from our choices.

In the words of Matt Huber, author of Climate Change as Class War, “If we really want to understand a rich person’s contribution to climate change, we shouldn’t just look at their consumption – we should ask how they became rich in the first place.”

And when we start to look at inequality through that lens of who profits off of and who controls what’s being produced and how its being produced, we begin to see that there are just a few rich people actually driving the climate crisis.

Eleven people dressed in suits walk into a conference room in Switzerland.

They sit down and begin to decide the fate of the world.

This might sound like an overstatement, but these eleven individuals steer the largest private building materials company in the world: Holcim Limited.

This company’s main business is cement, a highly polluting good, whose 2020 production, as Holcim admits in their annual sustainability report, put 156.3 million metric tonnes of carbon emissions into the atmosphere.

That’s almost 19,000 times what Taylor Swift emitted during her flights this year, or 0.45% of all carbon emitted in 2020.

Ten members of Holcim’s board and its CEO Jan Jenisch control a company that’s responsible for 0.45% of all global carbon emissions.

This is the inequality that is wrecking our atmosphere and driving the climate crisis.

Not only are these eleven people building their wealth from a corporation that is actively driving climate change, they also hold the power to drastically cut emissions within their company and yet, they’ve barely done so.

According to the latest IPCC report, industrial production emissions account for 34% of all global emissions– the most of any sector.

And just a few capitalists control and profit from the industrial corporations driving these emissions.

If we rounded up all the board members making decisions in the cement sector for example, that would roughly be 6,710 people.

The decisions they make about how their corporations are run and what they produce have tremendous ramifications for the rest of us.

They decide what we can choose.

In the words of Matt Huber, “what rich people do at home or in their car or on their private jet pales in comparison to the exploitation of labour and the wrecking of the earth that generates the money they enjoy.”

Unfortunately, the few who own the factories, the mills, the foundaries and wells where fossil fuels and all other materials for our built environments get made are ultimately beholden to profit, so, “when we choose commodities, we can only choose those that are profitable to produce in the first place.”

Under capitalism, the rich few who decide what gets produced, will always decide based on what will ultimately generate them profit.

Sometimes this means cutting emissions and waste, but most of the time it does not.

Let’s go back to Darren Woods the CEO of Exxonmobil, for a moment.

He, alongside his fellow capitalists steering the oil industry, have had a disastrous impact on the natural world.

One often cited analysis traced 71% of all industrial production emissions to just 100 fossil fuel companies.

The boards and owners of these companies without a doubt have immense and unequal control over our global emissions and our choice of energy.

If they decided to transform their production from one of fossil fuels to that of renewables tomorrow our global emissions would drop dramatically.

But it’s not just their own production that they hold sway over, the rich who own the means of production also have the power to sway the political realm.

Look no further than the Republican party of the United States.

During the 2020 election year industrial polluters like Koch Industries and Chevron put $63.2 million directly into the hands of Republicans, and spent a total of $139 million influencing elections across the country.

So, not only do the barons of industry control what is produced, they have immense influence on what policies governments enforce around the world.