Sacred Headwaters #37: The Individual Footprint

The "individual carbon footprint" is a concept that has become ubiquitous over the last two decades. Does it actually help us achieve long-term decarbonization, or is it a neoliberal distraction?

Sacred Headwaters is a bi-weekly newsletter that aims to guide a co-learning process about the existential issues and planetary limitations facing humanity and about how we can reorient civilization in a way that will enable us to thrive for centuries to come. If you’re just joining us, consider checking out the first issue for some context and head over to our table of contents to browse the whole library. The newsletters are not strictly sequential, but this exploration is meant to build on knowledge and understanding over time. Subscribe below if you haven’t already, and please share with friends, family, and colleagues who may be interested:

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Sacred Headwaters has a table of contents intended to allow readers to “catch up” more effectively, to facilitate using Sacred Headwaters as a reference, and to give a better picture of what the newsletter is about for those who are just joining.

Issue #37: The Individual Footprint

About a decade ago, in what often feels like another lifetime, I had the idea to build a “voluntary carbon tax” web platform: users would link their bank and credit card accounts and the platform would use machine learning to classify their expenses according to a database of lifecycle analyses, ultimately producing an aggregate “individual carbon footprint” that was more accurate and personally tailored than the traditional “how much do you fly and drive” calculators. Each year, it would invoice your carbon tax bill based on your consumption and you’d donate that to one of a number of recommended climate-related non-profits.

It’s an attractive concept: if people see their carbon footprint in quantitative terms — and, even more, see how their behaviors can change that footprint — won’t that help incentivize and accelerate decarbonization?

The concept of the individual carbon footprint has spread like climate-change-induced wildfire over the last 17 years to the point where it’s almost surprising when communicators choose not to use it. My local government in Squamish, BC recently jumped on the bandwagon and encourages residents to “Calculate [their] carbon emissions” with a made-in-BC personal emissions calculator:

The reality, unfortunately, is counterintuitive: the concept of the individual carbon footprint actually hinders climate action by distracting from the need for more structural change and for change in the power dynamics that govern society. This is perhaps elucidated most clearly by the fact that the individual carbon footprint calculator was invented by BP in 2004 as part of a marketing campaign rebranding themselves as “Beyond Petroleum.” We read about this in Issue #22: Fossil Fuel Companies in the piece, “The carbon footprint sham” (15 minutes); if you haven’t read that article, definitely go back and call it the first reading of this issue.

Part of the failure is more subtle, too: industry marketers have evidently understood this for some time, but social science research is now beginning to recognize that our efforts to encourage small behavior changes as a “gateway” may, instead of engaging people further in climate and environmental politics, be actively hindering their engagement. Instead of being empowering like many of its proponents believe, the push for lifestyle changes and a focus on individual footprint disempowers and disengages.

I should be clear before we go too much further here. On the margin, the right decision is more or less always the one that reduces your carbon footprint whether it’s switching to an electric car, eating less meat, or installing solar on your house. We, particularly as predominantly global north, high-emitting people, should be doing these things to whatever extent we can. But what’s more important than doing them? Talking about them, and specifically talking about things like why we have to choose between an ICE vehicle and an electric vehicle instead of being able to live without a car and travel by efficient high-speed public transit. Focusing climate communications on individual action and responsibility is a quintessentially neoliberal approach that boils the mechanics of society down to consumer choice, erasing the much larger and more complex system underneath. In practice, it engenders resentment and blocks meaningful progress on climate change at scale. (For an example that blurs the line of caricature, see the recent hubbub when Republicans claimed Biden was banning hamburgers).

I particularly like this frame outlining the five best things you can do as an individual that NASA scientist and activist Peter Kalmus posted on Twitter:

Individual emissions reduction is on the list, but a) it’s not first, and b) it’s explicitly about building a better life and encouraging others to do the same. Individual emissions reduction does matter, but when powerful agents and decision-makers evangelize the individual footprint and call on the relatively powerless (most of us) to make sacrifices, they actually discourage us both from making those changes and from exercising our power in more meaningful ways. To borrow another phrase from Kalmus, “We need a billion climate activists.” Does the footprint concept help or hinder in that goal?

As mentioned above, if you haven’t already read “The carbon footprint sham” (15 minutes), start there; the history of the “individual carbon footprint” concept can’t be disentangled from its present reality, and the lack of material progress it has accomplished over 17 years of ubiquity speaks to that. I’d also encourage you to review Issue #22 in its entirety as it explores some of the parallels that the carbon footprint has with plastic pollution and the narrative of recycling. From there, we’ll read about how “individualization of responsibility” has systematically disempowered both citizens as political actors and the environmental movement; about the fundamental and flawed assumptions that carbon footprint logic makes about how society works; and about some of the practical failures of the footprint and the consumer “nudges” approach. Lastly, to end on a slightly more positive note, we’ll read about an example of how individual behavior change may be significant — and why.

It is inaccurate and unfair to coerce people into believing that they are personally responsible for present-day ecological disasters because they consume too much or proliferate too readily. This privatization of the environmental crisis, like the New Age cults that focus on personal problems rather than on social dislocations, has reduced many environmental movements to utter ineffectiveness and threatens to diminish their credibility with the public. If “simple living” and militant recycling are the main solutions to the environmental crisis, the crisis will certainly continue and intensify.

Murray Bookchin put it succinctly in 1989, “Death of a Small Planet.”

Individualization: Plant a Tree, Buy a Bike, Save the World? (40 minutes)

Michael F. Maniates, Global Environmental Politics, 2001

Some of you are likely familiar with the “discourses of climate delay” paper that came out last year (it’s excellent). The section on the individualization of responsibility draws predominantly from this 2001 paper, a prescient masterpiece that, remarkably, predates the creation of the “carbon footprint” but nonetheless clearly examines the fundamental problems underlying it. Maniates opens with a discussion of Dr. Seuss’s The Lorax which makes a wonderful allegory for the cultural narrative of individual responsibility: consumer demand drives environmental degradation and the solution is painstaking individual action by a more educated future generation. He looks to this “individualization of responsibility” as the core problem with American environmentalism and while it may have been uniquely American in the 1990s, it’s spread globally since then. The rise of the climate crisis as an existential and global threat has only worsened the issues he describes; even the common phrase, “think globally, act locally,” reproduces a consumer-driven, individual and ineffective response. Maniates warns about many things we’ve since seen come to pass including how individualization accelerates the rise of “green consumerism” (I recently saw an outdoor adventure influencer leverage the climate crisis in a sponsored post selling product) and how it shrinks our fields of viable political action as citizens, leaving us with just “voting in important elections” as the allegedly most significant action we can take (an almost unbelievably common refrain from environmental organizations today). Ultimately, he calls on environmentalists to recognize that “individual responsibility” represents a “dangerous narrowing” of our environmental imagination; we need to recognize that meaningful change requires moving beyond the concept of “individual as consumer” and re-embracing our power as “citizens in a participatory democracy.”

Whose Carbon Footprint Matters? (10 minutes)

Matthew T. Huber, Associate Professor, Geography and the Environment, Syracuse University

In this article, Huber takes a step back to denude the logic behind individual carbon footprint reduction; Maniates alludes to the same thing but doesn’t explicitly draw it out. Huber argues that it is rooted in the idea that all goings-on in a “free,” market-based society are driven by consumer demand. If people change what they want, the market will do its thing and industrial production will rearrange to meet the new shape of demand. This is the essence of neoclassical economics; it’s the underlying principle that birthed the broader concept of neoliberalism; and it’s a way of understanding the world that erases entire dimensions of power and class analysis. The reality is that markets can be manipulated, created, and destroyed by powerful actors — typically, governments and corporations — and that while consumer demand plays a role in what is produced, what is produced (or rather, who is producing it) in turn plays a role in defining consumer demand. This is, of course, the entire premise of the advertising industry. It’s also the reason we all have personal cars and the reason so many of those cars are SUVs. Consumer demand is not an isolated, evolving blob of preferences to which the market responds. It never was and it never will be. So, with that misunderstanding of the world in mind, the “individual carbon footprint” and consumer choice as means for transformative change start to look a bit unsuited for the task. Neither responsibility for emissions nor the ability to change them can be fully attributed to the person instrumentally causing those emissions. Huber argues that responsibility should lie predominantly with those who are profiting from the emissions and there’s a strong case for this, especially since that profit is often proportional to political power. At the very least, this perspective elucidates a basic problem underlying the idea of individual footprints and the theory of change they imply.

Want some eco-friendly tips? A new study says no, you don’t. (5 minutes)

Kate Yoder, Grist

Discourse around individual footprints is almost always focused on things you can do to reduce your impact. From small to big, these are actionable and attainable — at least for those who can afford them — ways to feel like you are making a change in the world. Unfortunately, it turns out that the rhetoric employed to proselytize the low-carbon lifestyle can have effects that make people not only less likely to take those actions, but crucially, less likely to support climate action, vote for climate candidates, or even believe in climate change. This article was written in response to the release of one particular study that produced these findings, but Yoder interviews other experts as well who have seen this kind of “rebound effect” in response to behavior-focused climate messaging many times over the years. One particularly notable example for anyone who’s lived in the American west (or Alberta)? Apparently, “coal rolling” developed at least partially in response to environmental regulation and coal rollers can often be seen sporting a “Prius Repellent” bumper sticker. There’s a South Park episode from 2007 about how Prius drivers love the smell of their own farts called “Smug Alert!” It’s funny, but it also reflected real sentiment at the time. The point is, many of the efforts to drive behavior change that have been tried thus far have not only failed, they have failed so badly that they’re contributing to climate denial and anti-climate-action sentiment.

Travel by plane and you might get ‘flight shamed.’ This worries airlines (5 minutes)

Hugo Martín, LA Times. Open in an incognito window if you need to.

Flygskam — or “flight shame” — is a phenomenon birthed in Sweden that has apparently had impacts across Europe, driving significant declines in commercial air travel in at least Sweden and Germany. It is, at its core, a behavior nudge built around guilt: flying is the single worst thing that those of us who don’t own the means of production (as Huber would say) can do when it comes to emissions. As a social movement, it’s surprising to me that it’s seeing success, although it may be in large part because “I shouldn’t fly anymore” is an easy conclusion to reach on one’s own from available data. According to a number of sources, the impacts attributable to flygskam are significant enough to be slowing the growth rate of global flight demand and this article includes a number of promising quotes from airline industry executives who sound genuinely worried. In my view, this phenomenon blurs the line between individual responsibility and collective action; the Americanized individual responsibility is one where we don’t speak about the limited actions we’re taking because it’s not proper; “I’m not political” or “let’s not talk about politics” are the quintessential family-gathering copouts. While it may seem like an unpalatable approach over on this side of the pond, flygskam’s success might be because it is really a group action: people feel socially ashamed about traveling by plane because it’s something that’s discussed regularly.

Of course, a mild slowing of the growth rate of commercial air travel…is not exactly a win at the scale we need. But there are some political changes on the horizon in Europe that may be partially attributable to flygskam: France is banning short-haul domestic flights and the growing German Green Party hopes to eliminate all domestic flights by 2035 (albeit with an admittedly neoliberal-sounding strategy). These are steps towards the kind of transformative changes that can redistribute power away from those who profit most from emissions; individual action works when it can create collective political power to effect changes like this, but without an explicitly political goal, it seems to serve mostly to distract.

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