The carbon footprint was invented by Big Oil to blame you for climate change

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In deciding between saving face and saving the world, the lure of doing both has been too tempting to resist.

The oil companies would love nothing more that you spend the rest of your life bearing the brunt of climate change reversal through a guilty climate conscious living checklist. But it turns out that the concept of tracking your “carbon footprint,” a fashionable way to measure your personal impact on the environment, is a marketing term coined by a BP payroll advertising agency.

Read it twice: Blaming yourself and your way of life for climate change is an artefact of major oil advertising campaigns designed to deflect the perception of the primary role fossil fuel companies are playing in ecological calamity, according to a recent editorial in The Guardian by renowned author Rebecca Solnit.

While the common sense self-management skills of minimizing the amount of waste and pollution you create in the world are still crucial, no gradual status management action will reverse the damage that oil companies do every day.

Your “carbon footprint” doesn’t matter

Oil giant British Petroleum (BP) actually hired public relations professionals to invent a concept designed to blame individuals, not fossil fuel companies, for climate change. And it was BP that in 2004 revealed the expression “carbon footprint”, as well as a “carbon footprint calculator”. engaged public relations professionals Ogilvy & Mather to promote the idea that climate change is not the fault of an oil giant, but of individuals, ”science journalist Mark Kaufman wrote in Mashable. “It was here that British Petroleum, or BP, first promoted and quickly popularized the term ‘carbon footprint’ in the early years. The company unveiled its ‘carbon footprint calculator’ in 2004 so that it ‘one can assess how their normal daily life – going to work, buying food and (panting) traveling – is largely responsible for global warming. “

Public relations and marketing, or what you might today call insidious propaganda, are tasked with turning public consensus into a place of self-blame, deflecting criticism from fossil fuel companies so they can continue. to deny the reality of climate change. And the “main reason for beating the fossil fuel companies is that their product is destroying the planet,” Solnit wrote in The Guardian Op-Ed. She, too, has seen people break away from serious talk about worsening environmental disaster just to brag about their own drinking habits as if it were a modern ritual. Redecorating your consumer behavior so that your brand rinses itself cleanly on social media feeds actually hurts the struggle to slow and reverse the effects of climate change, even and especially when you think private choices can literally save the world. “Say you have a certain amount of time and money to make changes – call it x, since that’s what we mathematicians call things,” author and mathematician Bill McKibben wrote in a column. from 2008 to Orion Magazine.

The fossil fuel industry must change

“The trick is to take that 5 percent of people who really care and make them count for well over 5 percent,” McKibben added. “And the thing is democracy.” In other words, your private decisions and actions are simply not enough to significantly repair the damage, which means that collective action focused on promoting changes in policies and laws is a much more effective solution. . Companies like BP are relying on the false dilemma of doing it their own way or on the highway to manipulate steps deemed legitimate. That way, instead of approving policies that could affect the profit margins of fossil fuel companies, BP has shifted the blame and made us blame only individuals.

Over the past year, a slew of new carbon tracking apps have gained prominence, designed to allay your guilt of driving to the store, or catching a bus or train in the city by giving you the ability to ‘buy carbon offsets that finance biogas in Indonesia, tree planting in the UK or stoves in Mexico. One of those apps, VYVE, is backed by a subsidiary of BP called Launchpad, which is a venture-capital-type group that funds low-carbon startups aiming to become billion-dollar companies. In other words, the popularity of climate activism in consumer culture has been monetized to the point that it can create billionaires. It shouldn’t be surprising that the fossil fuel companies (and their subsidiaries) have essentially lied to us for higher profit margins. But the trick to moving forward is realizing that fossil fuel companies will continue to lie and shirk their climate responsibilities until they are legally forced to stop destruction. of the habitability of our planet. The fossil fuel industry needs to change its ways, so, as Solnit wrote, we should “[k]hang them on the hook. “

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