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I love that analogy. No, you're not going to personally save the world by reducing your carbon footprint. But you know what you are going to be? One leaf on a tree in a forest, making that little bit more oxygen that helps collectively make the world a better place.
And that's worth doing. Especially if you can encourage other people to be leaves too.
https://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2021/aug/23/big-oil-coined-carbon-footprints-to-blame-us-for-their-greed-keep-them-on-the-hook
The term would literally not exist in the public consciousness were it not for BP using it to shift blame. But yes, the concept itself is valid.
I will add that I grew up with rich kids, like kids of CEOs of corporations you would know well, and we also learned about carbon footprints from an early age. Most of the class did not score well, obviously. But every time a neglectful powerful person births a baby leftist educated by the greater community, we win.
It might've been invented by Big Oil, but if you keep giving money to Big Oil to buy fossil fuel you're at least partially responsible for the carbon emissions released by burning that fuel.
People have trouble with the concept of partial blame, they want to feel innocent. Black and white thinking, low-resolution ethics.
It's a necessary suppression to underpin individualist ideologies, I think.
Nevertheless, remember that the 'footprint' decisions of one oil exec outweigh the decisions of thousands or millions (or billions if you include descendants) of ordinary folk. But we do also outnumber them to that extent, so we have adequate power collectively.
We, well those of us in environmental activist roles anyway, were using the term regularly and as part of our public messaging in the mid-90's.
Bill Rees came up with the term at UBC a few years earlier and it was catching fire, but environmentalism is poorly funded so the messages spread slowly. Oil companies saw a grift opportunity and used it as a deflection strategy a few years later. They just got there first, and by throwing gobs of marketing money at it, controlled the narrative.
The message was getting out, but not at hypercapitalist rates. BP oiligarchs don't deserve credit for popularizing the term. Rees does, he did more than just coin it, he worked with us to make sure we built tools to understand it.