carbon footprint

The real message, underlying the staged tear and feather headdress, is that pollution is your problem , not the fault of the industry mass-producing cheap bottles. Another heralded environmental advertising campaign, launched three decades later in 2000, also won a laudatory advertising award(opens in a new tab) , a “Gold Effie.” The campaign impressed upon the American public that a different type of pollution, heat-trapping carbon pollution(opens in a new tab) , is also your problem, not the problem of companies drilling deep into the Earth for, and then selling, carbonaceous fuels refined from ancient, decomposed creatures. British Petroleum, the second largest non-state owned oil company in the world, with 18,700 gas and service stations worldwide(opens in a new tab) , hired the public relations professionals Ogilvy & Mather to promote the slant that climate change is not the fault of an oil giant, but that of individuals. 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(opens in a new tab) . The New York Times has a guide on “How to Reduce Your Carbon Footprint.”(opens in a new tab) Mashable published a story in 2019 entitled “How to shrink your carbon footprint when you travel.”(opens in a new tab) Outdoorsy brands love the term(opens in a new tab) . Of course, no one should be shamed for declaring an intention to “reduce their carbon footprint.” That’s because BP’s advertising campaign proved brilliant. The oil giant infused the term into our normal, everyday lexicon. (And the sentiment is not totally wrong — some personal efforts to strive for a cleaner world do matter .) But there’s now powerful, plain evidence that the term “carbon footprint” was always a sham, and should be considered in a new light — not the way a giant oil conglomerate, who just a decade ago leaked hundreds of millions of gallons of oil(opens in a new tab) into the Gulf of Mexico, wants to frame your climate impact. So when BP tweets an ad(opens in a new tab) encouraging you to “Find out your carbonfootprint” with their “new calculator,” it’s time to rethink the use of the term. While superficially innocuous, "carbon footprint" is intended to manipulate your thinking about one of the greatest environmental threats of our time. (The threat of nuclear warfare(opens in a new tab) with the potential for both the harrowing spread of radioactive material and the development of a nuclear winter are in the running, too.) “This industry has a proven track record of communicating strategically to confuse the public and undermine action, so we should avoid falling into their rhetorical traps,” said Geoffrey Supran, a science historian at Harvard University who investigates the tactics of fossil fuel interests. “You have to admit it’s very compelling. It's sticky,” said Susan Joy Hassol, a climate change communicator who worked as a senior science writer on three congressionally mandated National Climate Assessments. “It’s effective propaganda.” A large plume of smoke rises from BP's Deepwater Horizon offshore oil rig explosion in 2010. 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(opens in a new tab) , a professor of media and communication at the University of Brighton, BP publi