It’s been nearly two decades since the oil giant BP released a calculator to help consumers figure out all the ways carbon was creeping into their lives, from commuting to work to buying food. The PR campaign was wildly successful: It popularized the very idea of an individual “carbon footprint.”
The 2000s were a big time for climate accountability. That’s when Hurricane Katrina flooded New Orleans, putting climate change front and center within the world’s single biggest emitter and largest economy. Former U.S. Vice President Al Gore released his Academy Award-winning film “An Inconvenient Truth,” and there was a big push to get climate legislation passed through Congress (it failed in 2010, in a cycle that appears to have just repeated itself). Today the framework of the individualized carbon footprint is everywhere: Thanks to the power of campaigns like BP’s (which still exists), you could be forgiven for thinking that the burden of tackling the crisis rests squarely on your shoulders.
Drawing consumer choices into the center of climate outcomes helped fossil fuel companies look “like part of the solution rather than part of the problem,” says Duncan Meisel, director of the Clean Creatives activist campaign, which pushes advertisers to cut ties with fossil fuel companies. “I think you can look at this as a way of BP, and the oil industry more generally, trying to take some of that really intense energy and momentum towards climate action and steer it in a way that won’t impact their bottom line.”
Today, as 20 years ago, systemic and broad-scale action, such as governments adopting aggressive climate policies and companies weaning themselves off fossil fuels, are the most important way to fight climate change. But the fact that Big Oil popularized the idea of individual responsibility doesn’t mean there isn’t truth to the notion that people can make a difference. The false dichotomy is in thinking the answer is one or the other.
“The responsibility is with every person and every institution,” says Mike Berners-Lee, an environment professor at Lancaster University in the UK. “As an individual, the question to be asking is: What can