Worried about your carbon footprint? Well, that's kind of the point.

According to online carbon footprint calculators I have a higher-than-average carbon footprint for Africa. You can run your own carbon footprint calculation here or even here. My results are unsurprising as a child of an immigrant who occasionally travels via international flights to visit family. Moreover, I commute by car to get to university and work daily. I also own more than five pairs of shoes and occasionally eat meat. While these are all factors that contribute to my own carbon footprint, I want to explore where this kind of calculation came from and whether this is even a good measure of our individual impact on the planet. 

These are just some of the factors that go into carbon footprint calculations. 

One of the first questions that these carbon footprint calculators ask is whether you have taken any international flights in the past year. This is because the aviation industry accounts for 2.5% of global carbon emissions. What most of these calculators also offer is a carbon offset service, where you can pay a certain amount per tonne of carbon emitted through any flights you have taken. While these are, at best, not an outright scam, they are not a quantifiable long-term solution when there are not widely available and affordable alternatives if you need to travel internationally. They also ignore bigger issues with the aviation industry like ‘ghost flights,’ where empty planes are flown between cities to make up quotas or get pilots to different airports. There are bigger systemic issues with the aviation industry than individual passengers and their choices. 

These so called 'ghost flights' have been known about for over a decade. 

The second big thing that carbon footprint calculators ask is about electricity and fuel use, asking about everything from LPG and city power to the amount of coal and wood your household burns. While the electricity we use can definitely have an impact on the environment, this is also a more systemic issue. This is because in most places around the world, people do not have a huge amount of choice about which electricity source they use. In South Africa there are essentially two choices: use grid Eskom electricity or privately create your own through solar panels or generators. This means that most people do not really have a choice at all. 

A similar argument can be made for transport. Driving fossil fuel burning cars has an undeniably bad impact on greenhouse gas emissions, but when people have no choice but to drive or use taxis which also run on fossil fuels, this is not a reflection on the ability of the individual to reduce their carbon footprint. In places like London and Amsterdam, owning and driving a car has been made excessively expensive through fees and fines, and public transport systems are well connected and maintained. This makes it easier to individually lower your carbon footprint in London than in Johannesburg. Therefore, this also poses more systemic questions than individual ones. 

But, so far, we haven’t even asked: where did the idea of a carbon footprint even come from? The idea of the individual carbon footprint was created in 2004 by an advertising company for British Petroleum (BP). Yes, the most widely understood measure of how much YOU individually are impacting our planet was created through advertising in favour of a huge fossil fuel company. While I do think it is important to reflect on what kind of an impact we each have on the environment, I am not sure if calculating your carbon footprint is the best way to do this. Carbon footprint calculators do not take into account the systemic factors that our outside of our individual control. Moreover, they do not include anything about how the carbon majors that are actually the largest emitters of greenhouse gasses into the atmosphere, including BP. 

Here are some of the carbon majors. 

Yes, we should be examining our individual impact on our planet, and maybe exploring why my carbon footprint is much higher than the African average could be enlightening. But systemic change will be much more impactful and important. This is why I do not buy into the BP marketing of personal carbon footprints as accurate measures of our individual environmental impacts. And the carbon offset programmes offered by most of these carbon calculators prey on our feeling of guilt for existing in a world where we need to use electricity and commute in ways that emit greenhouse gasses, rather than calling for any kind of systemic change that would meaningfully change the choices we have as individuals. These measures of individual carbon emissions turn attention away from large corporations who cause up to 60% of carbon emissions, by making us worry about eating meat for dinner tonight or flying internationally to visit family once in a while instead of holding BP and the other carbon majors accountable.