The Big Oil Origins of the Term ‘Carbon Footprint’

British Petroleum created a ridiculously effective marketing campaign to obfuscate and deflect blame onto individuals

These days, like the legendary Seth Godin, I see just about everything through the lens of marketing. From electoral campaigns to political movements, from Pumpkin Spice lattes’ twelve years without any real pumpkin to guru entrepreneurs like SBF, Elizabeth Holmes, or Bill freaking Gates claiming they’ll save the world, and from NFL Armed Forces Weeks to bringing ‘democracy’ by droning schools, the United States of America is too damn good at marketing.

The obvious other word that could be used is propaganda, and there is an interesting history of the public relations and communications fields euphemizing that ‘p-word.’

Today, it is generally agreed that companies run marketing campaigns and (foreign) governments run propaganda influence operations.

But, with its ‘innovative spirit,’ the US is by far the best in both.

As the former CIA director Bill Casey famously said, “We’ll know our information operation is successful when everything the American people believe is false.” Mission accomplished, Bill.

But when it comes to corporations with hundreds of billions of dollars at their disposal, the line between marketing campaigns and propaganda operations disappears. These companies have way more money than many governments, so I think it’d be fitting to call their PR and marketing divisions ‘Propaganda Units’ and the executives ‘Propaganda Ministers’ because that is the role they play.

They spend billions of dollars on mass influence campaigns to sway opinions and misinform the general public.

And they’re way too good at it.

I recently wrote about how Exxon’s own scientists accurately predicted global warming fifty years ago, but publicly the company sowed doubt and confusion.

They were so effective that all right-wing media, ‘intellectuals,’ and politicians repeat the myths nonstop and have created a voting base that thinks melting ice caps and starving polar bears are suffering from the ‘Woke Mind Virus.’

Big Oil was clever enough to not simply deny, deny, deny. They got people to doubt the science they themselves knew was accurate.

And, in a sinisterly genius move, they aimed a campaign at the better aspects of our nature.

They crafted a marketing plan to get kind-hearted people who want to make a difference to see the problem as individual and deflect from the fact that they’re the multi-billion dollar companies destroying the planet.

And again, they’ve been too effective.

The phrase and campaign they came up with: carbon footprint.

No single person, even if they get all their friends on board, can cut one billion tons of carbon dioxide emissions. We need change on a global and exponential scale.

Somehow, I had no idea that Big Oil coined the term carbon footprint. But, holy sh*t, it is genius. Back in the early 2000s, British Petroleum — a company that did $157,000,000,000 in revenues in 2021 — hired the public relations firm Ogilvy & Mather to create a campaign that put the blame for excess carbon emissions and climate change from the oil giant and onto individual citizens.

These evil wizards took this unseeable intangible problem of too much carbon and methane in the air and turned it into something real: a footprint.

And not only that, they took the global warming and excess greenhouse gases that are mostly emitted by multi-billion dollar companies and turned it into your individual issue to solve.

In 2004, the company unveiled a ‘carbon footprint calculator’ so citizens could see how their daily life activities, commuting to work, buying food, and traveling, were contributing to the warming of the planet. They made a video interviewing people in the street, asking them if they knew their ‘carbon footprint,’ and urging viewers to go to the website and check their score.

Fast forward to today, and carbon footprint is everywhere. It has completely become a part of the lexicon, and again, it is genius.

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. — Mark Kaufman

Individual people have footprints. They’re innately human. If Google, Nike, or Chevron are walking down the beach, what does their footprint look like?

Corporations are ‘people’ and have the ‘free speech right’ to ‘petition their government’ and give unlimited sums of money to politicians — what can only be called legalized corruption — but do corporations have footprints? Or as a reader recently commented, corporations are people, but can they get the death penalty?

Nope. They are amorphous blobs hiding in the background of everything we do. We hardly see the influence they have, and do not talk nearly enough about their carbon emissions because they don’t have ‘footprints.’

Big Oil companies have carbon tsunamis that flood your city and drown your children or carbon wildfires that burn your neighborhood or carbon freaking superstorms that bury everyone you love.

But due to the genius of this marketing campaign, we all talk about footprints like Greta and British freaking Petroleum are near the same level, just two individuals walking down the beach leaving almost-equal imprints in the sand.

…the term ‘carbon footprint’ should probably be retired, unless we’re going to utilize ‘carbon death tsunami’ anytime we talk about a Big Oil company.

Of course, that is not the case. And the sad reality is that without structural large-scale shifts, what we do as individuals is largely ineffective. No single person, even if they get all their friends on board, can cut one billion tons of carbon dioxide emissions. We need change on a global and exponential scale.

Mother Jones reported back in 2020, “research shows that since the late 1980s, just 100 big companies — including BP — are responsible for about 70 percent of global emissions. BP is near the top of the list of the highest-emitting companies in the world, responsible for more than 34 billion metric tons of carbon emissions since 1965.”

A hypothetical but epic backyard garden, cycling commute, and zero-plastic lifestyle are all awesome but aren’t doing much to fight climate change when companies like BP are creating billions of metric tons of carbon, the freaking US military is emitting more than most countries, and billionaires are producing one million times more greenhouse gases than us regular peasants.

We saw further evidence for the need for large-scale systemic shifts during COVID. People were locked down, prohibited from traveling, and generally much much much more sedentary. Daily global carbon emissions reflected that change and went down.

But, as Mark Kaufman wrote in an excellent piece for Mashable in 2020, “critically, the true number global warming cares about — the amount of heat-trapping carbon dioxide saturating the atmosphere — won’t be impacted much by an unprecedented drop in carbon emissions in 2020 (a drop the International Energy Agency estimates at nearly eight percent compared to 2019). This means bounties of carbon from civilization’s cars, power plants, and industries will still be added (like a bank deposit) to a swelling atmospheric bank account of carbon dioxide.”

Unfortunately, we can’t save the planet as solitary people doing the right thing or by pausing life for a year or two.

Living in a modern Western nation, even some of the least polluting among us are still unsustainably tipping the scales. As Kaufman reported, “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. “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.”

And that is not to be all doomer and depressing.

Getting solar panels, going zero-waste, and making an effort are important. Those actions can have an impact and inspire the hell out of people.

But it’s all about that classic battle between individual and collective action.

It can be hard to rise up to the challenge when it seems so vast and daunting. As humans, we’re not good at thinking about planetary-level problems and solutions.

And when discussing things that could stem the climate chaos, the conversation gets so deep so quickly because there isn’t one area or one thing that needs addressing to fix the problem.

We have to recognize that everything is connected.

Fantasyland economic systems built on eternal growth and hyper-competition for ever more scarce resources are charging full-steam ahead and won’t stop on their own.

In our schizophrenic economic paradigm, we’re wasting forty percent of the food we produce while people starve, have more empty houses than homeless citizens, and have companies incentivized to burn millions of tons of unsold products.

That’s the ‘rational’ system we’ve produced.

We’ve got consumerism, overconsumption, and ubiquitous advertising that keep us constantly discontent, needing to buy more useless sh*t and seeing ourselves through the freaking brands we wear and the amount of rubbish we own rather than as humans with ideals, dreams, and inherent value.

A society hyper-worshiping psychotically insane and excessive private wealth accumulation can never be sustainable.

And the term ‘carbon footprint’ should probably be retired, unless we’re going to utilize ‘carbon death tsunami’ anytime we talk about a Big Oil company.

At a minimum, we should carry a little more grace when interacting with our fellow humans on the subject and seek to inspire rather than judge. Nobody is perfect, even the homeless living in a carbon-heavy nation have unsustainable emissions.

And having regular people at each other's throats about their ‘carbon footprint’ is exactly why BP created the term in the first place.

But we should surely be trying. Inspiration and ideas spread. And where we spend our dollars makes an impact. Vegan options aren’t popping up all over the place out of altruism.

The good draws to it the good.

And when we act as a collective in unison, we can create a tsunami of good.