1/22/2024 0 Comments Carbon footprintMuch attention has been given to how much plastic Americans consume ( 35.3 million tons per year, enough to fill the 104 million-cubic-foot AT&T Stadium in Dallas every 16 hours) and how each individual should be changing their behavior to help combat this waste. The inadequacy of our carbon footprint as a driver of change is painfully highlighted when you look at single-use plastics. “It’s system change that’s really needed so that people have better choices.” “We build our cities this way,” Hassol says. One research report from the Norwegian University of Science and Technology found that roughly one third of a city dweller’s carbon footprint is determined by public transportation options and building infrastructure. If we don’t own our home (and more than 30% of Americans don’t), we may not be able to properly insulate or install high-efficiency appliances. Most of us have limited options for where we live, how far we have to commute to get to work, what kind of energy is available to heat our homes, etc. One of the challenges with the carbon footprint measurement is how few of the factors an individual controls. As Mike Tidwell, the executive director of the Chesapeake Climate Action Network, wrote in a 2007 op-ed, “every time an activist or politician hectors the public to voluntarily reach for a new bulb or spend extra on a Prius, ExxonMobil heaves a big sigh of relief.” A complete paradigm shift is needed-both in the way we conceptualize our individual climate impact and in the ways we calculate the emission impacts of those ultimately responsible: corporations and governmental systems. The same way that you give your child a toy to play with so you can finish your task uninterrupted, everyday citizens are busy changing out lightbulbs and buying electric cars while the true cause of global warming continues uninterrupted: a civilization dependent on fossil fuels. The reality is that the future of civilization is being decided at a political and corporate level that no individual can impact. The Trump administration rolled back more than 100 environmental rules and regulations. Big corporate names like Costco and Netflix are loudly committing to reduce emissions but unable to set meaningful targets or put plans in place. Fossil fuel giants are funding climate change skepticism while simultaneously lobbying for tens of billions of dollars in subsidies. Just 100 companies are responsible for 71% of global emissions. Yet the reality is that the future of civilization is being decided at a political and corporate level that no individual can impact. Climate change has become an individual problem, caused by our insatiable appetite for consumption, and therefore a war that must be waged on our dinner plates and gas tanks, a hero’s journey from consumer to conservationist. The universal adoption of the term “carbon footprint” hasn’t just changed how we speak about climate change. ![]() “It was done so intentionally,” says Susan Hassol, director of the nonprofit science outreach group Climate Communication. These campaigns, most notably the long-running Keep America Beautiful campaign, imply that individuals, rather than corporations, bear the responsibility for change. In the 30 years prior to the carbon footprint campaign, polluting companies had been using advertising to link pollution and climate change to personal choices. ![]() A decade later, British Petroleum started promoting a new term: “carbon footprint.” In a splashy ad campaign, the company unveiled the first of its many carbon footprint calculators as a way for individuals to measure how their daily actions-what they eat, where they work, how they heat their home-impact global warming.īP did not adopt the footprint imagery by accident. In 1992, a Canadian ecologist named William Rees coined the term “ ecological footprint,” a measurement of how much any entity was impacting the planet’s ecology.
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