Who benefits from the notion of individual carbon footprint?
One morning in November, during the absolute consumerist horror of Black Friday, I was browsing Facebook when I came across an article that struck me as a little intellectual atomic bomb: “Forget your fingerprint carbon, let's talk about your carbon shadow”, by Emma Pattee, on the online media MIC. The article is in English, and it contains in my opinion a central idea to stop the bullshit of the bourgeois ecology of small gestures: what if the indicator of the "carbon footprint", which makes it possible to quantify the use of carbon emitted by a person, an activity or an organization, only paradoxically worsened our relationship to ecology?
The carbon footprint, a tool for… individual quantification
Let's take a very calm look at the history of this great idea that is the carbon footprint. As early as 1997, various countries around the world agreed in principle to reduce greenhouse gas emissions. It is the Kyoto Protocol, signed in 1997, which comes into force in 2005 in the signatory States. This international framework agreement obliges countries to measure their greenhouse gas emissions (carbon dioxide, methane and four other gases whose long names are spared you), which then makes it possible to calculate the equivalent in CO< sub>2, that is to say the famous “carbon footprint”, or “carbon footprint”. This indicator is becoming an essential tool for quantifying the human impact on climate change.
To democratize the idea that all human activity has an equivalent in CO2 emissions (a carbon footprint therefore, if you are still following) and an impact on the climate, a calculation method is emerging science to enable companies to quantify their emissions: this is the carbon footprint tool. It developed in France in the 2000s thanks to the work of French scientist Jean-Marc Jancovici and ADEME (Agency for the environment and energy management). This diagnostic tool is, according to one of the managers of the Bilan Carbone Association, one of the only existing ones when it was developed in the 2000s, with an American tool (the GreenHouse Gas Protocol).
We could have stopped there and blamed the multinationals whose carbon footprint is equivalent to that of several developing countries. But then individual versions of this accounting developed, such as the personal carbon footprint. They calculate your carbon emissions based on your lifestyle (housing, means of transport, number of people in the household, diet, etc.) and the products you own and consume. Try it, it's dizzying.
I may have stopped eating meat and recycled my clothes, but I still live in a Parisian apartment built in Gruyère cheese, which heats and insulates very poorly, and I consume dairy products. There are huge flaws in our Western way of life, which is a structural problem, which we gladly make up for with the famous “small gestures” we were talking about, those which give a good conscience. It always feels good to tell us that the cardboard protecting our new phone, which arrived from China in 24 hours, will go in the recyclable bin.
But if I tend to pale when I see huge promotions on Asos jeans in my Instagram ads, am I solely responsible for my compulsive purchase and therefore my carbon footprint? Who emits in the first place, the individual, through his consumption, or companies through the production of emitting goods and services? The responsibility of the two parties seems difficult to quantify, but I am tempted to bring out my old economics lessons to prove, for once, the eco-orthodox: according to Say's law, “every supply creates its own demand “…reducing production would therefore be a reasonable starting point.
The elites pollute, the oppressed clink glasses
In addition to being constantly tempted by overconsumption, we are Westerners, with much more polluting lifestyles than those of developing countries: the NGO Oxfam, in its 2020 report on inequalities in emissions of CO2, showed that “the richest 10% of the world's population (about 630 million people) are responsible for 52% of cumulative CO2 emissions. ” Concretely, “the carbon footprint per capita of the richest 10% is more than 10 times greater than the target set (approximately 2.1 tonnes/year per capita) and that of the richest 1% 35 times higher.” The responsibility of the richest is therefore unequivocal.
In addition to wealth inequalities, there are other criteria that add to the inequalities between our carbon footprints: surprise, gender, class and race, the structuring factors of oppression in our society, also operate as by magic in the inequalities of carbon emissions!
As early as 2009, a report by UNFPA (a UN fund) shows that women have a lower carbon footprint than men, and suffer more violently from the consequences of climate change. According to the study, they eat less meat, take less car and plane, recycle more, and are generally more willing to worry about environmental problems... but they are also more concerned about the consequences of climate change. , due to their greater dependence on the environment (particularly in agriculture), the fact that they are generally responsible for keeping the household and therefore its resources, and that households headed by women, who are in poorer than men, are more affected by climatic disasters.
More generally, it is the most oppressed and precarious populations who first suffer the consequences of climate change: forced migration in the face of climate disasters, precariousness in the face of health and economic crises, health problems linked to pollution or to food… The elites pollute, the oppressed clink glasses. As explained by Cy Lecerf Maulpoix, author of Deviant Ecologies. Voyages en terre queers (Cambourakis, 2021), in this article by Mediapart, the climatic and social crises are much more violent for “the working classes, racialized people, migrants or even LGBTQI+ people, in particular trans people and workers and sex workers”. The repeated confinements due to the health crisis have made trans people more precarious, people without papers and/or people awaiting care, as well as sex workers who have seen their activity plummet (testimonials here and there).
Racialized people are the first to be affected by the exploitation of certain lands and their resources, and suffer the harmful effects: the chlordecone scandal, a toxic pesticide used in Guadeloupe and Martinique from 1972 to 1993 which poisoned soils, rivers, the sea and the bodies of West Indians, is an unfortunately very telling example.
The currents of ecofeminism, decolonial ecology, queer ecology or even political ecology are extremely relevant to understanding the inextricable links between the need for ecological struggle and the fight against patriarchy , colonialism and capitalism.
Are other indicators possible?
To recap: the carbon footprint makes it possible to quantify our carbon emissions, which are themselves very dependent on our way of life, our social identity and of the country in which we live.
To complement the carbon footprint indicator, and count not only CO2 emissions but also the biologically productive land needed to supply all we consume, the carbon footprint indicator environmental footprint, or ecological footprint, has been forged. The Global Footprint Network test gives you the details of your ecological footprint (built-up areas, forests, cultivated land, pastures, fishing areas)… and the number of planets it would take if everyone were like you.
The limit of the concept of carbon footprint is very rightly pointed out by the article I was talking about at the beginning: “Our carbon footprints do not accurately reflect our individual impact on the climate crisis. And by encouraging green people to use carbon footprints as “guides” to combat climate change, we risk seeing them wasting their energy on low-impact individual actions that are easy to quantify, such as recycling or turning off lights. , instead of putting that energy into more useful work, like lobbying local politicians or identifying forms of office waste.”
The real waste would therefore be to focus only on the measurable and the individual, to the detriment of a change of magnitude. Small gestures reassure us because they are quantifiable, but they have a relatively low impact and above all, they distract us from the essential: putting our energy into a system change.
For this, the article proposes the concept of "carbon shadow", which would encompass not only our carbon footprint but also: "How you vote, how many children you choose to have, where you work, where you invest your money, how much you talk about climate change, and how your words amplify urgency, apathy or denial.” Author Emma Pattee talks about three main pillars in this carbon shadow: his consumption, his lifestyle choices (so no more working in oil groups, for example), and his attention (directed towards climate change).
The carbon footprint tool is therefore a necessary but incomplete diagnosis. Especially since the article insists on an important fact, which I had never heard of: the concept of carbon footprint was popularized… by the oil industry. The British company British Petroleum (BP) helped to anchor the idea and the legitimacy of this notion in people's minds. In 2004, it unveiled its tool for calculating the carbon footprint, and the following year, focused an advertising campaign on "your carbon footprint" (also recently, BP's communication focused on the calculation of "your" carbon footprint , always on an individual scale)… A great way to empower customers, and to give a damn about the world, when we know that the company is among the 40 most polluting companies in the world.
The notion of carbon footprint therefore helps to consider climate change from an individual angle, without ever questioning the system in which our actions are embedded. The necessary and urgent objective of reducing our individual emissions via “high” impact actions (at the individual level: the vegetarian diet, the reduction of the plane and the individual car) must not evacuate the crucial question: Who benefits from this accounting? How not to take the guilt of the climate crisis on an individual scale, and not exhaust ourselves in low impact actions? How to change system in a massive way? BP, as well as all growth-crazed capitalism, maintain with all their might the paradigm of an individual ecology (thus never thinking of capitalism as a given that could no longer exist), which allows them to continue to make profit while worsening the climate crisis.
Emma Pattee sums up: “By promoting the carbon footprint as the most important thing to focus on when you are a concerned citizen, the fossil fuel industry has ensured that we do not put our energy on what really matters: collective action and activism”. Collective action and activism are therefore more than urgent to move from the ecology of small gestures… to the ecology of major revolts.
