As it turns out, the idea of a carbon footprint actually first came from a BP Marketing campaign in the early 2000s. https://thred.com/change/how-the-carbon-footprint-originated-as-a-pr-campaign-for-big-oil/
According to the article below, MIT students have calculated the "carbon footprint" of homeless people that sleep in shelters and eat from soup kitchens. It is still roughly 8 metric tons per year of carbon, the implication being that all people living in carbon dependent societies will still have a higher carbon footprint than those not.
https://mashable.com/feature/carbon-footprint-pr-campaign-sham
Even just stop and ask yourself the question, if I get a (non electric) taxi to work is that my emissions or the taxi driver’s? What are the implications of this anyway? Is the taxi driver supposed to just give up their source of income?
And according to this article by the guardian, what is to stop, for instance, the paper clips used by staff in a toy factory for filing papers to count in a small way to the emissions of the toys? It is not as straightforward as a simple ‘number’ to calculate your carbon usage.
https://www.theguardian.com/environment/2012/apr/04/carbon-footprint-calculated
The idea of a carbon footprint for an individual is meaningless - we need to have holistic pictures of carbon footprints for (at the very least) entire companies.
What do you think?
