Whose idea was carbon footprinting?

In my book, Sustainable Web Design, I tell the story of how the junk food industry addressed the growing problem of litter in the 1970’s. As companies such as Coca-Cola increasingly promoted products sold in disposable packaging, towns and cities became cursed by litter on their streets. In one of the greatest public relations successes of modern history, these companies banded together to launch a campaign to convince the public that the litter on the streets was not the fault of the companies whose logos were printed on it, but of the ordinary people who had dropped it. They founded a puppet environmental organisation called Keep America Beautiful and coined the term “Litter bug” to demonise the disgraceful citizens littering the streets. Pressure was deflected away from the corporations who created these new disposable products, onto the people who we could see dropping litter in front of us. It let the industry largely off the hook for the next 50 years.

So when pressure to tackle climate change started rising in the 1990’s, the fossil fuel industry also looked for ways that they could shift the problem onto other people’s shoulders. And this is where we find the term “carbon footprint“ creeping in to our vocabulary. While the term “ecological footprint” had been coined by ecologist William Rees in 1992, it was the global oil company BP who burned the concept into the public consciousness. With the help of advertising agency Ogilvy & Mather, they repackaged the ecological footprint as an individual persons carbon footprint. In 2004 BP launched the first carbon footprint calculator online to help us all see how much of a problem we were all creating. It even won a Webby Award! Just as litter became “our“ problem, BP successfully shifted the narrative to make the climate crisis “our“ problem too.

No longer just individual footprints

Here we are, almost 20 years later and carbon footprinting has spread beyond individuals and into the corporate world. In fact, its been adopted so strongly in the corporate sector that it seems to have become something of a religion. Measure > Reduce > Offset have become the three commandments of sustainable business. And why not? It sounds like good advice.

Consider though that more than 70% of the world’s greenhouse gas emissions are caused by the activities of just 100 fossil fuel companies ¹. Those of us who run the world’s other few hundred million businesses are being told that we need to put time and resources into calculating our corporate carbon footprints. Should we perhaps stop for a minute and ask if we’ve been hoodwinked? Is this a brilliant act of misdirection?

BP relaunched their carbon footprint calculator in 2019

The genius of the litter bug campaign was that the fast food industry were right. We should all do our best not to drop litter on the streets. In the same way, the fossil fuel industry has played into the fact that we also know that we should try to reduce our own carbon footprints, as individuals and businesses. But has this warped our perspective? Has it led us into the trap of believing that we can solve it all ourselves? And is this limiting our collective ability to solve the climate crisis?

Hitting the limits of carbon reduction

I’ve been involved in carbon footprinting since BP launched that first calculator tool and I have always believed it to be an essential pillar of environmental progress. I’ve even led a project to create a popular carbon calculator tool, so I’m far more invested in this concept than most people. But perhaps that’s why I’m able to question it.

In my own business, we calculate our corporate emissions every year and have been doing so since we started. While we initially found that it helped identify areas for improvement, in the past few years the data has provided little in the way of direction. It has begun to feel less like meaningful climate action and more like a business overhead. In fact, reflecting on what the data did teach us over the years, I can’t help but think that it would have been easier if someone had just given us a list of things to do.

Our data has highlighted one interesting thing in recent years though. It’s that a big chunk of our corporate carbon footprint is out of our control. Having invested significant time and effort to reduce our emissions over many years, we are left mostly with what I would call “the emissions of existence“. No matter how hard we try, no matter how efficient our business, there is a limit to how much further we can reduce our emissions. There are real emissions that come from simply existing in a world where our energy largely comes from burning fossil fuels.

We are told that we need to set targets to become a Net Zero company, and yet once we have reduced everything that we have the power to reduce, becoming Net Zero is just a fancy way of saying that we’ll pay money to offset our emissions of existence. It doesn’t actually offer us any solution to prevent those emissions. Carbon offsetting of course, is the other side of the carbon footprinting coin, now a multi-billion dollar industry that directs our attention away from the real problem and toward the mirage of an easy solution.

We must not ignore these emissions of existence. In 2020, when large parts of the global economy were shut down and we were forced to do many of the things that we think should solve the problem, like stop flying, drive our cars less and buy less stuff, global energy related emissions dropped only by about 6% . How much of the remaining 94% were our emissions of existence? And how do we solve them? Are these the questions that the fossil fuel industry is hoping that we don’t ask?

Rebalancing our perspectives

My concern with carbon footprinting is not that it isn’t a useful tool, but that it’s become dogma and the cult leaders are the fossil fuel companies themselves. The growing obsession with carbon footprinting as the solution to everything has directed our attention towards one small point. It blinds us of the bigger picture, including the wider range of stakeholders involved, the more radical solutions that might be needed and the broader ecological crisis that is about more than just carbon emissions.

Carbon footprinting can be a very useful educational tool and can help drive real action in some cases, but it is only one tool. We need to rebalance our perspectives, ensuring that all organisations are taking appropriate responsibility for their part in the problems and the solutions. We need to prioritise climate action over climate reporting and use the right tools for each job, whatever they might be. We have limited time and we need to use it wisely.

1. Are 100 companies causing 71% of carbon emissions?