This page is an excerpt from Issue 2 / Chapter 3.
The idea of the carbon footprint is to calculate and reduce the amount of fossil fuels we personally are responsible for burning. How much gasoline do we personally burn by driving each year, and can we reduce it? How much natural gas do we burn to heat our own home? How much fossil fuel must a power plant burn to provide the electricity for our refrigerator and other electrical appliances we personally own?
The most shocking fact about the carbon footprint is that it was literally invented and promoted by the fossil fuel industry. The idea of a carbon footprint wasn’t developed by Greenpeace or the Sierra Club – it was created by a public relations firm hired by the fossil fuel corporation BP. Obviously, phasing out fossil fuels is an existential threat to fossil fuel corporations, so when a fossil fuel company comes up with an idea to help society phase out fossil fuels, we should be extremely suspicious.
In 2004, BP launched its “carbon footprint calculator,” allowing anyone to figure out their annual contribution to greenhouse gas emissions. There are several major reasons why BP and other fossil fuel corporations have been such enthusiastic supporters of the carbon footprint.
#1 It won’t work
A carbon footprint-based approach to fighting climate change cannot possibly work:
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.
“Even a homeless person living in a fossil fuel powered society has an unsustainably high carbon footprint,” said Stanford’s Franta. “As long as fossil fuels are the basis for the energy system, you could never have a sustainable carbon footprint. You simply can’t do it.”
In other words, there is no plausible way for individual efforts to lead a transition away from fossil fuels, even if every single individual person tried to act as climate-consciously as possible. Grocery stores do not sell food that did not use fossil fuels at some point, whether for planting, fertilizing, harvesting, or transport. You cannot plug your refrigerator into a different outlet that connects to wind turbines instead of a fossil fuel plant. Trying to solve climate change based on understanding and reducing our carbon footprint is certain to fail. Of course, fossil fuel corporations support an approach to phasing out fossil fuels that can’t possibly work because they don’t want the world to succeed in phasing out fossil fuels.
But we can take this logic a step further. The reason you have such a large carbon footprint is because of how our world is assembled, rather than how any individual acts within those broken systems. We use our cars so much because it is unsafe to bike, not possible to walk, and not practical to use our anemic public transportation system. We live in homes with large utility costs because those are the homes subsidized by the government, whereas homes with lower utility costs are not. If you moved to one of the scarce units of housing with adequate access to public transportation, you would succeed in lowering your personal carbon footprint; however, this would not lower humanity’s carbon footprint because there would still be the same number of homes without access to reliable public transportation.
In other words, we need systemic change to how our world works. No amount of effort to reduce one’s personal carbon footprint will phase out fossil fuels.
#2 It neutralizes the climate movement by supporting a bad set of strategies
When people think about climate change in terms of a carbon footprint, they think about climate change as the sum of individual actions, rather than what it really is: the logical result of a totally broken political and economic system. To halt climate change, we need a strategy to fix these broken systems.
How do we fix broken systems? By joining political organizations that push for changes in public policy. In Issue 3, we will learn about how ordinary people have successfully made sweeping changes to public policy and how the climate movement can reproduce these successes.
But when we see climate change through the lens of the carbon footprint, our strategy to fight climate change is highly individualized: you should install new windows. You should bike to work. But what’s actually needed is not to obsess over our personal decisions, but to join the fight for public policy changes. More important than a single person’s decision to ride their bike to work on a single day is supporting measures that would make it safer for everyone to ride a bike; more important than a single person deciding to ride the bus on a single day is to fix the gross underfunding of our public transportation system. But you can’t create such sweeping changes as an individual – you need to join a political organization.
Put another way, a carbon footprint calculator will never tell you to join a political organization, even though that is the most effective thing you can do to help phase out fossil fuels.
#3 The powerless are blamed, and the powerful avoid accountability
The carbon footprint idea places all blame for the climate crisis on individuals who have no power to solve it: you should replace your leaky windows; you should ride your bike to work. But our personal decisions are not the important factors driving the climate crisis, and changing them would have a negligible impact on worldwide greenhouse gas emissions. As we pointed out in Iss1/Ch4: ride your bike, and the government will continue to subsidize the fossil fuel industry and approve new drilling projects. Eat more climate consciously, and the world’s richest will continue to invest in fossil fuel corporations. Buy reusable grocery bags, and the world’s largest banks will continue to pour money into fossil fuel projects. Forgo straws, and corporations will continue to renege on climate pledges. Sort your recyclables, and fossil fuel corporations will continue to spread misinformation about climate change, as they have prolifically since the 1950s.
Clearly, the responsibility for and the ability to address the climate crisis lie with corporations and governments. But in a carbon footprint calculator, your decision to ride your bike is of utmost importance, while government permitting of fossil fuel projects is a nonconsideration. Your decision to take the bus is of utmost importance, but investor and bank financing of fossil fuel projects is a nonconsideration. Placing blame on ordinary people for problems corporations and governments knowingly caused obviously suits BP and corporations writ large.
Carbon footprints and Issue 2
Since coining the term “carbon footprint” in 2004, BP hasn’t reduced its production of fossil fuels, and a major reason why has been the success of the carbon footprint campaign.
The connection to this issue should be obvious. When we see climate change through the lens of the carbon footprint, our strategy for reducing emissions concentrates on our own individual choices rather than the necessary systemic changes. Faced with roads that are unsafe for biking and a grossly underfunded public transportation system, the only realistic way to reduce our carbon footprint in transportation is to buy an electric car. But as we’ve seen throughout this chapter, that’s a false solution; the real and viable solution is changes to public policy in favor of biking, walking, and public transit.