Man on a bike
(Image: AAP/Darren England)

There’s plenty of advice about how to lower your carbon footprint out there at the click of a Google. Just divest your super from fossil fuels, avoid flying in planes forever, slash your meat intake (your dog’s, too), throw next to no garbage out, only catch electric public transport, wear second-hand clothing, and have one fewer child.

Our individual actions really add up, right? We consumers are the reason the earth is choking on pollution and headed towards the hottest year on record, and we can each do our part to turn it all around if we work together, right?

Twenty years ago, BP paid a bag of cash to ad guys to make sure we believe it — and feel guilty about it.

In 2004 BP, or British Petroleum, hired a world-renown advertising firm known as Ogilvy & Mather to design a campaign around shifting the climate responsibility onto the consumer. It was the right pick for the dirty job — the agency, founded in 1948, has worked on campaigns for big tobacco for decades (as recently as the past few years, in fact).

Ogilvy & Mather creatives got to work on what would become BP’s “carbon footprint calculator”. It allowed a consumer to enter seemingly innocuous daily habits — getting groceries, heading to work, travelling — with a handy algorithm spitting out a number that holds the consumer personally accountable for the climate crisis.

Amazingly, the calculator is still live on the site, though now you can alleviate your guilt by paying to offset your carbon emissions even if most carbon credits are dubious at best. Caught one international flight from Sydney to Vancouver and drove 200,000 kilometres? That’ll be US$460.78 for us to clean up 60.79 tonnes of your carbon, says BP.

The term “carbon footprint” was a runaway success in the decades since that fateful Ogilvy campaign and it shifted the growing climate conversation towards individual responsibility as fossil fuel companies continued mostly business as usual. Just last month the BBC offered, via a chipper “Sustainability on a shoestring” category, “Six ways to lower your carbon emissions quickly”.

“Much of the change needed to curb climate change quickly goes well beyond what any individual can do — from improving renewable energy infrastructure, to a rapid phase-out of fossil fuels. But individual actions can add up too,” the story rather self-defeatedly reads.

However, if every single person on earth stopped flying today, it would reduce just 2.5% of our global emissions, a fact the BBC’s story notes just two lines down. It’s not only a minuscule improvement, but a completely impossible one — particularly as it’s private jets frequented by the rich and famous that are supercharging the climate crisis on a per capita basis.

Laying the climate crisis on the backs of the common folk dates back further than the 21st century, however. ExxonMobil took inspiration from the tobacco industry in launching more than 180 communications, including advertorials in The New York Times, to “shift responsibility for global warming away from the fossil fuel industry and onto consumers”, a 2021 study for One Earth by Naomi Oreskes and Geoffrey Supran at Harvard found.

The pair found the rhetoric of climate risk and consumer energy demand had allowed ExxonMobil to construct what the study dubbed a “fossil fuel saviour” frame that “downplays the reality and seriousness of climate change, normalises fossil fuel lock-in, and individualises responsibility”.

It’s this micro-politics of language, the study continues, that allows the fossil fuel giant to “continue to undermine climate litigation, regulation, and activism” — the same sort of “demand-as-blame” arguments which allowed the tobacco industry to shift corporate responsibility away from corporations.

In Australia, our emissions pie is thus: about 15% agriculture; 20% manufacturing, mining, residential and commercial fuel; about 18% transport; 3% waste; 6% industrial processes — all things we could make a tiny dent in by each changing our lifestyles to lower our carbon footprint.

But more than a third — some 34% — of our emissions are from companies including ExxonMobil and BP burning coal and other fossil fuels, even though renewables are now the cheapest form of electricity generation in Australia and, in this country of sun and wind, far more accessible than anything we dig up.

Put another way: just 100 companies are the source of more than 70% of the world’s greenhouse gas emissions since 1988 — spewing out about 23.8 billion tonnes every year — according to a 2017 study from Carbon Majors, while you are personally responsible for about 0.00000002% (4.7 tonnes). So why do we feel like it’s all our fault?