TIL about the phrase 'carbon footprint'

It's spread to being used by more entities than just BP, but the blame-shifting purpose remains the same.
Climate change can only be solved by regulating fossil fuel production at its source (e.g. taxing it enough to fully compensate for its negative externalities), not by trying to guilt-trip individuals.
- Yup.
  The same trick is played with recycling. Blame the end consumer for a supply chain completely out of their control.
  The biggest polluters are corporations and we stop their pollution by regulation. These mega corps would have you believe that it's really your fault PFAS are everywhere because you shouldn't have bought those Teflon coated products. Nevermind the fact that Teflon is everywhere a nonstick surface is needed.
  
  Yep. The personal responsibility gambit (or should I say fallacy?).
  It was such a clever idea, starting with Coca Cola's "Litterbug" campaign (where they campaigned against bottle deposits under the guise of wanting "personal responsibility" over "regulations.")
  It's "up to the consumer" to make the right choices. It just so happens that the meat from decently treated animals is five times more expensive and that you have to drive 100 miles to buy it. Or that being environmentally conscious has been made into a tiring exercise in futility where you constantly have to inconvenience yourself.
  As an added bonus, individuals trying to convince other individuals to inconvenience themselves in the same way can be painted as obnoxious, holier-than-thou and insufferable. A real double win for unscrupulous big business.
  
  The fact that teflon is still everywhere should be proof enough that regulations are worthless in the face of capitalism (a feature of course, not a bug)
- Climate change can only be solved by ~~regulating fossil fuel production at its source~~ abolishing capitalism.
  
  I don't think it's reasonable to be this extremist, there are other ways to solve climate change. But since we're already trying to fix it getting rid of capitalism would be the best way because we wouldn't be fixing just the climate issue, we'd also be fixing a whole slew of other issues that are just next in line after the climate issue.
- Plenty of other ways from a carbon tax -- not least of which because the carbon tax has itself proven to be a convenient industry distraction that sucks air out of the room.
  Especially since it's not clear removal tech will ever be able to ramp up sufficiently to cover continued burning.
  A carbon tax is an albatross. It's not even worth seriously discussing. It's ten steps beyond politically infeasible -- probably even more infeasible than actual prohibition. It's innately regressive even if you try to do weird structural things like progressively returning the money (because the return is just going to be economically inefficient and complex tax codes ALWAYS benefit the poor and vulnerable the least).
  And most importantly, the fossil fuels have to stay in the ground. We have already pumped out too much and we must move towards pumping no more.
  The fossil industry would in many ways LOVE for a carbon tax solution because that would be the exception to prove the rule that continued extraction will be allowed forever. That their business model, which has plenty of cash already, can drill baby drill.
  And in the meantime, we continue along the path of e.g. the IRA and invest heavily in alternatives, renewables, and infrastructure development. Fossil fuels are already a significantly more expensive energy source than solar and wind and that gap will only keep growing wider, ESPECIALLY if we delete fossil subsidies. And those learning curves are how we will kill fossils worldwide. Why should a developing nation with flexible climate ethics be importing Russian coal when they could be building renewable energy production that does not require importing a suspect commodity that will be even cheaper for them?
  
  Then why does CCL actively promote carbon fee and dividend as its most beneficial policy? Your logic doesn't even make sense - you're saying the fossil lobby would love to be taxed further? Nonsense. If that were true, we'd have a carbon fee enacted decades ago. It's not innately regressive, and your reasoning doesn't even make sense because your entire premise rests on complexity = bad, not any actual logic. This isn't to say it's politically feasible, but you haven't offered a politically feasible method for just stopping drilling altogether. All a carbon fee does is offer a revenue neutral way to slowly and surely shift everyone's behavior by pricing in externalities. It's very much viable and equitable, and if you think it's somehow harder than banning fuel and banning capitalism you're simply not being serious. We have a market mechanism to prevent bad behavior - taxes and fees. Let's use them. Feel free to ban extraction too, but that's not where I'll be focusing my personal lobbying efforts.
  https://citizensclimatelobby.org/basics-carbon-fee-dividend/
- Climate change can only be solved by regulating fossil fuel production at its source
  I like this. Balance the cost equation of recycled plastic vs new plastic vs glass/metal (since glass and metal are basically infinitely reusable and recyclable) for single use and minimal use items so they're more expensive and it tips the scales making many things far more financially-responsible to both produce and consume in a climate conscious manner
- No problem, we can tax it at 20'000 % or whatever is the correct amount.
  It will then turn out to be completely uneconomical to use fossil fuels at their true price, as it should've been.
  Same goes for wasting freshwater and waterways/groundwater pollution. The tax needs to reflect the damage.
  Market mechanisms will still work, we just need to prevent companies from externalising the cost of the damage they are causing.

You know that scene in the Jurassic Park movie? Where there's this big dinosaur print, big enough to step into?
Imagine a footprint so big that you can stand in it without knowing it's a footprint, and you leave your own teeny tiny adorable little footprints inside it.
BP's is still bigger than that
- Also, BP is only 2% of world oil production, so make that footprint 50x larger again.
- BP's is to that what that is to yours.
- Are you thinking of the 1998 American Godzilla film?
  
  Not sure? They may have done that too, or instead. As far as that goes, I seem to remember it being done in land of the lost (the show, can't remember if it's in the movie or not).
  
  Tell me you've never seen Jurassic Park without telling me you've never seen Jurassic Park.

Same with plastic companies trying to encourage plastic recycling, they're only doing it because the real solution is to ban or regulate their business.
- And the big secret is that plastic recycling happens much, much less often than you think. In Australia less than 10% of what gets collected for recycling is actually recycled. It's similar in other countries.

Yep.
Now let's talk about the blame-shifting campaign behind "vampire power", as if your coffee maker or tv using .5 watt on standby is going to make such a big difference that we need changes to its design.
- To be fair, some devices sit there drawing a lot of power. I saw close to 50w while my (mostly sourced from Goodwill) AV setup was plugged in and "off" and quickly started turning off the power strip they were all plugged into after seeing that
  
  Same. I’ve got a TV in my basement. It’s got my 5.1 receiver and speakers and stuff on it. Not a great system, by any stretch (I’m sure my 3.1 soundbar is actually much better for most use and especially my living room layout), but it’s there.
  We don’t use it very much. One day I went down there and the receiver was hot to the touch. Apparently someone had left it on. I’m not really sure what it was doing to make that much heat, but we all know that heat is a waste product for electronics.
  Immediately put a smart power strip on that sucker.
  Also got one on my desk. I keep a bunch of laptops at-the-ready for work (one daily-driver and 4 test systems), on USB-C docking stations and a KVM. Used to be I heard the fans on those docks spinning all the time, and my office was much warmer. Not so much anymore.
- My old ISP-supplied cable box/DVR would be pretty toasty when it was on standby. That thing was vampire for sure.
  Now, my phone charger, not so much.
- Vampire power used to be a big deal. If you have any old time power supplies that feel solid and heavy, they’re analog, transformers, and used significantly more power. While it was little compared to the appliance, it would always draw power and that adds up as we got more devices.
- And landfill the old ones, of course.

Yep. Most of the green push is propaganda to shift blame from oil companies who produce the vast majority of greenhouse gases.
- As John Oliver does a great job of pointing out what “carbon offsets” really mean here https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=6p8zAbFKpW0
  
  Here is an alternative Piped link(s):
  https://m.piped.video/watch?v=6p8zAbFKpW0
  Piped is a privacy-respecting open-source alternative frontend to YouTube.
  I'm open-source; check me out at GitHub.

But Taylor Swift's jet?

Source?
- https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Carbon_footprint#Shifting_responsibility_from_corporations_to_individuals