“Carbon Footprint” and The Truman Show

I keep thinking of a scene in The Truman Show, the 1998 speculative comedy/drama starring Jim Carey, about a man who unwittingly lives his life as the subject of a reality show staged within a massive, domed studio. As Truman begins to suspect the true nature of his reality, his attempts at leaving his town are thwarted in increasingly absurd ways. When he visits a travel agency, he encounters the scary poster pictured above. It’s almost as if the marketing materials at the agency are designed to dissuade him from actually booking a flight.

Every time I hear the term “carbon footprint” I think about that poster. As I wrote recently, this term was devised by the global marketing agency Ogilvy for their client British Petroleum. (Want to dive deeper? Here’s another article. And another.) Jon Stewart is also onto the spin, with an episode of his new Apple TV show devoted to the messaging we’ve been fed by oil companies about climate change, specifically calling out BP’s use of “carbon footprint.”

The term ostensibly suggests caring about our planet, but hides a pernicious subtext, that climate change is a cause for guilt, and that each individual person or organization should assume responsibility for that guilt, with a strange lack of accountability from those who actually have the power to stop extracting carbon from the ground.

If you want to make money in marketing, you want to inspire action, and when you want to inspire inaction, you make people feel bad. Imagine if instead of “Just Do It,” Nike had gone with, “Get some exercise, fatass.”

The people who create a crisis shouldn’t be the ones who control the language used to understand and confront it. It’s time for the term and concept of “carbon footprint” to be retired.