Apparently, the term "carbon footprint" was popularized by the oil company BP over a two-decade, multi-million dollar marketing campaign in order to convince "ordinary people" to take a share of blame for environmental change, even if their impact is negligible compared to mass polluters like BP. After all, it is more difficult to blame someone else if you yourself feel like you are part of the problem.
Apparently, they are also behind all those "carbon footprint calculators" appearing everywhere.<p>TA compares this to a similar campaign by Coca-Cola, PepsiCo and Anheuser-Busch to "stop pollution" and recycle (these companies themselves are responsible for a majority of plastic waste and recycle hardly any of their bottles).<p>The article also mentions that even though most people severely cut their "individual carbon footprints" during the pandemic (especially by not flying and not driving to work), the amount of carbon released into the atmosphere is still 92% of 2019 and at the same level as 2010. That because the large climate polluters are releasing more than ever and cleverly shifting the blame for it to everybody...<p>I'm not sure yet which consequences to draw from this but the interesting part for me was that I myself had totally jumped on a hype train created by Ogilvy & Mather on behalf of BP without any idea whose ideas I was actually parroting when telling colleagues to "fly less and reduce their carbon footprint" etc. Certainly another lesson to be more critical of the thoughts and truths we all consider obvious and self-evident in everyday life.