It’s here that British Petroleum, or BP, first promoted and soon successfully popularized the term “carbon footprint” in the early aughts. The company unveiled its “carbon footprint calculator” in 2004 so one could assess how their normal daily life — going to work, buying food, and (gasp) traveling — is largely responsible for heating the globe. A decade and a half later, “carbon footprint” is everywhere. The U.S. Environmental Protection Agency has a carbon calculator. The New York Times has a guide on “How to Reduce Your Carbon Footprint.” Mashable published a story in 2019 entitled “How to shrink your carbon footprint when you travel.” Outdoorsy brands love the term.
“This is one of the most successful, deceptive PR campaigns maybe ever,” said Benjamin Franta, who researches law and history of science as a J.D.-Ph.D. student at Stanford Law School.
“It’s time to go on a low-carbon diet,” BP wrote in bold letters on its website in 2006, with its “carbon footprint calculator” just a click away. (In 2004 alone, 278,000 people calculated their footprints.) The site was part of BP’s ad campaign, “Beyond Petroleum.”
Fast forward, and BP is still producing bounties of oil and gas every day (4 million barrels a day in 2005 versus 3.8 million barrels today). In 2019, BP purchased its “biggest acquisition in 20 years,” new oil and gas reserves in West Texas that gave the oil giant “a strong position in one of the world’s hottest oil patches,” according to the company. Today, BP touts its foray into lower-carbon fuels, but these are limited in scope. In 2018, BP invested 2.3 percent of its budget on renewable energies. Its bread and butter is still black oil and gas. What low-carbon diet?
It’s evident that BP didn’t expect to slash its carbon footprint. But the company certainly wanted the public — who commuted to work in gas-powered cars and stored their groceries in refrigerators largely powered by coal and gas generated electricity — to attempt, futilely, to significantly shrink their carbon footprint. In 14-year-old web pages no longer accessible online but documented by Julie Doyle, a professor of media and communication at the University of Brighton, BP published ads asking “What on earth is a carbon footprint?”, “Reducing our footprint. Here’s where we stand,” and “What size is your carbon footprint?”
Doyle concludes BP sought to explain what a carbon footprint is “in a way which assigns responsibility for climate impact to the individual, while BP registers its own concerns by appearing already to be doing something about it.”
Yet in a society largely powered by fossil fuels, even someone without a car, home, or job will still carry a sizable carbon footprint. A few years after BP began promoting the “carbon footprint,” MIT researchers calculated the carbon emissions for “a homeless person who ate in soup kitchens and slept in homeless shelters” in the U.S. That destitute individual will still indirectly emit some 8.5 tons of carbon dioxide each year.
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