Did you know that the concept of a “carbon footprint” was devised by the BP Oil corporation?
True story. In 2006, the company posted a notice on its website that read, “It’s time to go on a low-carbon diet,” and included a link to a personalized carbon-footprint calculator that would allow users to “find out how your lifestyle choices effect your carbon emissions.”
Wrong use of “effect,” but that’s not the point.
Why, we might wonder, would an oil company create and promote the idea of tracking an individual person’s or family’s carbon output? Wouldn’t a byproduct of that awareness be a reduction in energy usage, fossil fuel production and, jumping ahead a few steps, BP’s own share price?
Simple: They figured out how to transfer the responsibility for carbon emissions onto the individual consumer and away from the people who are actually harvesting the fossil fuel and putting its byproducts into the marketplace.
It’s the same reason why every month DTE sends me a list of tips to lower my energy consumption even though its bottom line depends on me still using it. The company gets to offload the burden of energy conservation to its customers, continue its profitable business as usual and appear to care about the environment, all for the cost of an automated email.
The fossil fuel industry did not create this tactic. (Fun fact: Automakers coined the term “jaywalker” to deflect blame from the drivers in car accidents involving pedestrians to the victims.) But as the journalist Beth Gardiner explains in the startling new book “Plastic Inc.: The Secret History and Shocking Future of Big Oil’s Biggest Bet,” they perfected it.
“Plastic Inc.” is a damning expose of how synthetic plastic came to infiltrate our homes, lives, natural spaces and bodies. Alarming facts abound: About 5 billion bottles worth of plastic falls on the Earth every year just in the rain and wind. A typical American brain will accumulate about seven grams of microplastics across a long life, enough to make a small spoon.
The dominion of plastic is a story of reverse progress. As technology and efficiency have improved across the decades, our reliance on plastics has increased, counterintuitively and by orders of magnitude. Today, about 500 million tons of plastic are produced annually, up from about 2 million in the 1950s.
This did not happen by accident. As Gardiner explains, plastic’s abundance and persistence is the result of concerted lobbying and marketing efforts that make a mockery of both sustainability and common sense.
Until the middle of the 20th century (to simplify the story), consumer products were built to last, which was great for the customers, but not so much for the industries that needed people to keep buying things.
This is where we get the idea of forced obsolescence, which for the fossil fuel industry took the form of “the lucrative idea of disposability.” To hedge against the looming green energy revolution, the big oil companies have aggressively manufactured and promoted “single use” products, which now account for half the world’s commercial supply of plastic.
So how did Big Plastic convince the world to embrace disposability when the industry is perfectly capable of making products that are reusable or durable? By running P.R. campaigns to promote ideas that would seem responsible, such as cleaning up litter and recycling.
What could be the downside to wider awareness of practices most people agree are good? Well, think about what the industry stands to gain from that. Suddenly, as Gardiner explains, “the mess wasn’t the fault of companies reaping huge profits from disposability, but of Americans themselves. And responsibility for fixing it was on them too.”
And it works. I still think about my personal carbon output instead of pursuing collective change. I still wash out my recyclable plastics, sort my waste and pay to have it hauled away, under the mistaken impression that my behavior as an individual consumer will make more of a difference than, say, meaningful regulatory reform. The whole thing smells like garbage.