Ever since the earliest versions of “Reduce, Reuse, Recycle” entered the public dialogue, environmentalists everywhere have been taking those words to heart. You’ve done your part picking up litter, carpooling, and recycling your bottles, but has the oil industry done its part too?

Auden Schendler, the senior vice president of sustainability at the Aspen Skiing Company and the chairman of the board of Protect Our Winters, writes in this op-ed for the New York Times that American consumers have been carrying the weight of massive polluters for too long. The real path to stopping climate change starts from the top down. 

We need more of that approach — citizens, businesses, and governments working together to address this crisis. It might result in policy solutions like government regulation, effective carbon taxes, national standards for renewable energy and electrification, the elimination of legacy subsidies for the fossil fuel industry, strict auto emission standards, and new national building codes. All of these approaches threaten fossil fuel’s business model and, not coincidentally, would help to slow the warming of the planet.

Why This Matters: According to the International Panel on Climate Change, the world is in a “code red” and running out of precious time to reduce carbon emissions and limit global temperature rise to 1.5 degrees Celsius. Without addressing the oil industry’s false narrative, that task may be next to impossible.