I love that analogy. No, you’re not going to personally save the world by reducing your carbon footprint. But you know what you are going to be? One leaf on a tree in a forest, making that little bit more oxygen that helps collectively make the world a better place.
And that’s worth doing. Especially if you can encourage other people to be leaves too.
Are plastic recycling and “what’s your carbon footprint?” scams to shift blame away from Big Oil? Yes.
Should you try to recycle and reduce your carbon footprint anyway, despite that? Also yes!
I’d argue that the concept of a carbon footprint is not, inherently, a scam. You do have an impact on the world. Your carbon footprint is a real and genuine measure of that impact. And taking actions to reduce your carbon footprint is a way to mindfully track, measure, and reduce that impact.
Oil company propagandists may have used this real thing - your carbon footprint - to shift blame away from the oil companies and redirect people’s efforts to reducing individual consumption instead of working for political change. Which is bad. But the carbon footprint, itself, is not a scam - just the uses to which big oil put it.
Plastic recycling, on the other hand, is fake industry propaganda from start to finish.
And honestly, if I’m on my soapbox, I’ll remind everybody that “reduce, reuse, recycle” is in order of preference. Recyclable paper bags may be better for the environment than single use plastic bags, but bringing your own reusable cloth bag to the grocery store is even better. Just because a single-use product is recyclable doesn’t make it environmentally friendly.
https://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2021/aug/23/big-oil-coined-carbon-footprints-to-blame-us-for-their-greed-keep-them-on-the-hook
The term would literally not exist in the public consciousness were it not for BP using it to shift blame. But yes, the concept itself is valid.
It might’ve been invented by Big Oil, but if you keep giving money to Big Oil to buy fossil fuel you’re at least partially responsible for the carbon emissions released by burning that fuel.
People have trouble with the concept of partial blame, they want to feel innocent. Black and white thinking, low-resolution ethics.
It’s a necessary suppression to underpin individualist ideologies, I think.
Nevertheless, remember that the ‘footprint’ decisions of one oil exec outweigh the decisions of thousands or millions (or billions if you include descendants) of ordinary folk. But we do also outnumber them to that extent, so we have adequate power collectively.
People always take private jets as an example. And while they are very polluting, air traffic is only responsible for 2-3 % of all CO2 emissions. Transportation in general is responsible for almost a quarter of all emissions, and almost half of that is just regular cars, road freight is a third and the rest is aviation and shipping. So all the passenger cars are responsible for around 12.5 % of all emissions. That’s mostly just people going to work or grocery shopping.
I will add that I grew up with rich kids, like kids of CEOs of corporations you would know well, and we also learned about carbon footprints from an early age. Most of the class did not score well, obviously. But every time a neglectful powerful person births a baby leftist educated by the greater community, we win.
We, well those of us in environmental activist roles anyway, were using the term regularly and as part of our public messaging in the mid-90’s.
Bill Rees came up with the term at UBC a few years earlier and it was catching fire, but environmentalism is poorly funded so the messages spread slowly. Oil companies saw a grift opportunity and used it as a deflection strategy a few years later. They just got there first, and by throwing gobs of marketing money at it, controlled the narrative.
The message was getting out, but not at hypercapitalist rates. BP oiligarchs don’t deserve credit for popularizing the term. Rees does, he did more than just coin it, he worked with us to make sure we built tools to understand it.
While true in theory, you only have so much effort to give. The capitalist/bureaucratic system is designed to exhaust us, to make free time feel like a waste so we have no time to reconsider our economic position and restructure our lives to benefit each other. Avoiding capitalist middlemen that can upcharge us and shape our cultural/material reality into something that gets us to contribute to the current oppressive structure.
The propaganda-cultivated sense of moral obligation to laboriously do some tiny individualist good by reducing your carbon footprint through consumer choice is meant to exhaust you and distract you. It doesn’t just shift blame, it expends your willingness to put effort into saving the planet in a way that doesn’t harm BP’s bottom line.
There are so many ways to benefit the planet that benefit you: saving money eating delicious vegan meals at a community kitchen (prepared with care by some of the best cooks in your community), getting access to better quality tools and appliances because your community has a well-stocked tool library and you can just borrow what you need for a fraction of the cost, decreasing medical waste by unionizing/protesting/rioting/revolting until you get high quality preventative healthcare, building/rebuilding neighborhoods to be walkable with high quality public transit to increase your physical and emotional wellbeing while decreasing emissions, or countless other options.
just don’t think too hard about how %s work