Did you know that a marketing firm employed by British Petroleum (BP) in 2004 came up with the idea of a personal carbon footprint?
BP’s carbon footprint calculator enabled ordinary people like you and I to go online and assess how our everyday activities added carbon dioxide to the atmosphere. The website proclaimed to users how it was “time to go on a low-carbon diet.” [Source: Mashable]
It was so insanely successful that the term “carbon footprint” is now entrenched everywhere within environmental literature twenty years later.
This is not a good thing.
“[BP’s carbon footprint calculator] is one of the most successful, deceptive PR campaigns maybe ever.”
— Benjamin Franta, Climate Change Litigator
[Source: Mashable]
BP has successfully duped us through misinformation and clever advertising into believing that if every household makes sacrifices, we can alter the course of the climate crisis.
This is not true.
It’s a scam.
The everyday activities of ordinary people are not what’s driving climate change. And BP knows it.