Podcast
Your ‘carbon footprint’ is a marketing ruse
How an oil company built one of the most pervasive marketing campaigns in history — and how it’s still fooling us today.
On The Carbon Copy podcast this week:
The term “carbon footprint” is everywhere. But it’s not rooted in the environmental movement. It’s rooted in a two-decade corporate marketing campaign created by an oil giant.
Mashable reporter Mark Kaufman recently dug into the backstory of the term. He looked at the history of how companies have used advertising to shift the burden of responsibility for industrial pollution away from them and onto us.
And that brought him to BP, which launched a highly successful marketing campaign around “beyond petroleum” — and put the concept of the carbon footprint at its center.
This week, we look at the story of how that campaign is still fooling us about the real solutions to climate change.
Guest: Mark Kaufman, a science reporter for Mashable. You can read his article about the history behind the carbon footprint here.
The Carbon Copy is a co-production of Post Script Media and Canary Media.
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