Carbon Footprints and Big Business

What is a carbon footprint? According to the United States Environmental Protection Agency, it's the total amount of greenhouse gases that are emitted into the atmosphere each year by someone's daily activities, both directly and indirectly. For example, driving a car adds to your carbon footprint, and so does choosing to eat beef.

Carbon footprint, a popular measure of one’s impact on the environment, is often used as a signifier of how well a person is doing in limiting actions that contribute to carbon emissions entering the environment — the lower, the better. Articles and websites detail many ways to reduce a carbon footprint, warning consumers about the consequences that their actions have on the planet. The EPA’s website even provides a resource for calculating a household's carbon footprint.

Yet, the prominence of individual carbon footprints in the public eye started not with governmental initiatives, but with an advertising campaign from oil giant British Petroleum (BP). In 2000, the marketing firm Ogilvy and Mather was hired to push the carbon footprint into the American lexicon. They succeeded and helped along the perception of blame for climate damage onto the shoulders of individuals rather than corporations. After all, BP created the first carbon footprint calculator in 2004. Companies are more responsible for pollution but they're trying to persuade individual consumers that they are responsible and that they can ultimately make the difference.

That's not to say that choosing a bike instead of a car or showering for a shorter length of time doesn't help the environment; it does. When the COVID-19 pandemic hit, many people had to alter or cancel planned trips and vacations. The decrease in travel, especially flights, contributed to the lowest measurement of carbon dioxide emissions for the United States in decades. However, individual actions are not nearly enough for controlling the rising temperature of the planet. That's where companies and collectives should step in, because consumers are not the main producers of greenhouse gasses either.

For example, take the burning of fossil fuels, agriculture or the beef industry. The burden of those emissions should not be placed on individuals. The emphasis on household or individual carbon footprints distracts from larger systemic issues which require governmental legislation and industry regulations to resolve. Those running corporations have more power than an individual consumer, and thus more power to effect change. The difference made between one person not buying a product and halting the production of that product entirely is quite large. The clothing industry provides clear examples where the company has much more control of environmental impacts compared to the consumer. According to the Smithsonian, washing a t-shirt with hot water instead of cold water is only around 1% of the total. Transport and production were much bigger slices of the pie, at 22% and 70% respectively.

Sadly, some companies engage in obfuscation tactics to appear like they’re invested in change. Greenwashing is when companies actively misinform about the environmental benefits of their product. It's an advertising tactic, and also occurs when an organization spends significantly more time and money on marketing being “green” than on environmentally sound practices. In 2019, it was revealed McDonald's paper straws were non-recyclable. Their customers think they're doing better, even though the replacement didn’t really make things better for the planet. In the fast-fashion industry, H&M was exposed for including “environmental scorecards” with items of clothing that portrayed their production as better for the environment than they actually were. Sometimes they reversed the impact entirely, claiming items that used 30% more water in manufacturing used 30% less, said Quartz.

It is unethical for companies to engage in these practices, but the lobbying they do for means of turning profits is even worse. In industries with a high carbon impact, companies attempt to influence political decisions regarding environmental policies to maintain current regulation. They hinder progress towards net zero, the goal of balancing greenhouse gas emissions with removal by carbon sinks.

According to the Harvard Business Review, companies in the automobiles and parts sector spent an average of about $1.8 million lobbying U.S. officials against climate change-related regulations. Shockingly, more than 1,500 American lobbyists work for fossil-fuel firms while also representing universities and green groups, the Guardian reported. And BP, the creator of the carbon footprint, has recently lobbied against European Union initiatives to reduce its use of natural gas. Unfortunately, lobbying is effective in stalling change. Thus, companies should stop doing so and redirect those resources into solving the problem that they’re creating.

It is disgraceful for companies such as BP to feign support for reducing carbon emissions through seemingly beneficial side projects like carbon offset commitments while funding opposition to policy changes that would mandate genuine transformation. If they do not uphold their promise, these efforts may as well be footprints in the sand.