The Disturbing Purpose of the Carbon Footprint

Not a day goes by without people competing on lowering their carbon footprint. Everyday a new person is receiving accolades for managing to live for a year while producing less than a trash can of waste. As amiable as these actions are, no one seems to be asking an important question. Does it matter? The answer is an underwhelming no. The average American produces 27 tons of Co2 every year, since the lifespan of an average American is around 79 years, over his/her lifetime, the average American will produce 2,133 tons of Co2. While that may seem like a lot, in 2019, humanity collectively emitted 43 billion tons of Co2 so if you were to cut down to 1 ton of Co2 every year for the rest of your life (a 96.3% decrease), you would offset around 0.0000000023% of a year’s worth of carbon dioxide, over 79 years. Put simply, it is nearly pointless to make an individual change to solve a problem as widespread as climate change.

Interestingly, almost everyone is being encouraged to buy an electric car install solar panels or being waste free. Anyone with a basic understanding of statistics and an internet connection can figure out that eliminating any excess waste from a single person’s life is insignificant. The proportion of a bacterium’s height to that of the Burj Khalifa is larger than the proportion of an individual person going waste free compared to global emissions. Deception is the reason, and the culprit has decades of experience. Big oil deceiving the general public isn’t a new phenomenon, it was scientists hired by the American petroleum institute that first proposed that burning fossil fuels could lead to global warming in 1959. It was Exxon scientists who confirmed the aforementioned theory in a series of papers published in 1972. It was Exxon scientists that found that, in the worst-case scenario of unfettered carbon emissions, millions of people would lose access to safe, portable water at all times and that 4 billion people, more than half of the current population of the earth, would be water insecure for at least 1 month of the year. It was Exxon that published non-peer-reviewed advertorials mocking climate scientists between 1984 and 2006, and it was mega-corporations that spent in excess of 1 billion dollars in advertising, PR, and of course, political contributions.

The saddest part of all this is that it worked: around 13% of Americans believe that human activity is not responsible for rising global temperatures. Furthermore, many important political figures deny climate change with one senator erroneously stating,” The idea that manmade gases, CO2, are causing catastrophic global warming is the greatest hoax ever perpetrated on the American people. “Covering up their moral failings of isn’t a new concept in the fossil fuel industry, all that has changed since the late 1900s is the tactics. Fossil fuel companies have moved from outright denials of objective reality to simply offloading the blame to individuals with little to no control over the entire problem. Companies such as BP, ExxonMobil, Saudi Aramco, and many others often put on a green front while continuing to pump millions of barrels of oil from the ground causing billions of tons of carbon dioxide to be emitted. Moreover, 100 companies produce around 71% of all emissions with 1/3 of all emissions being produced by 20 companies. These companies want no regulation under any circumstance as even a small increase in taxes or an extra regulatory clause would result in billions of lost profits and a carbon tax would be catastrophic if any of these companies want to maintain their current profit margins.

As immoral as it may be, these companies do the sensible thing: deceive millions to stop the public outcry over the ever-worsening climate crisis. Tools such as the Carbon footprint tracker were first created by BP, with the websites of BP, ExxonMobil, Saudi Aramco, Shell, and many others showcasing their efforts in ‘sustainability’. These companies do not undertake such measures help solve global warming. Bringing carbon emissions to a net 0 would mean one thing for these companies: bankruptcy. Ensuring that the public remains fooled in thinking that such companies were ‘green’ and that the blame of climate change rests on the shoulders of private individuals to prevent the masses from demanding a solution is a top priority on the agenda of such companies.

In pursuit of the greatest and most admirable goal of large, international megacorporation's, ever-increasing short-term profits at any and all costs, big oil is willing to, cheat, harm, and deceive in order to line the pockets of their shareholders regardless of the human costs, morality, and the interests of society.