![]() In recent years, the company’s direct greenhouse gas emissions have started to dip, though they rose in 2019 after some major acquisitions. The oil giant is now reckoning with - or at least acknowledging - that legacy. BP is near the top of the list of the highest-emitting companies in the world, responsible for more than 34 billion metric tons of carbon emissions since 1965. But research shows that since the late 1980s, just 100 big companies - including BP - are responsible for about 70 percent of global emissions. You might think that a company evangelizing the carbon footprint would have its own house in order. The underlying message: Let’s talk about how to solve your emissions problems. More than 20 years ago, one of the company’s marketing campaigns helped cement the perception that the responsibility for reducing emissions lay with individuals, working the phrase “carbon footprint” onto our tongues. It’s a concept made popular by - get this - BP itself. Environmentalists have long obsessed over the emissions associated with their lifestyle decisions - whether to fly, own a car, and eat red meat. The corporate promises are new, but the conversation about our personal carbon emissions has been around for decades. Amazon plans to get to “net-zero” emissions by 2040, Microsoft vowed to go “carbon negative” by 2030, and Lyft plans to have an entirely electric fleet of vehicles by 2030. The “carbon footprint” concept is everywhere these days, as a range of big corporations pledge to slash their carbon emissions to tackle global warming. “I want to be the leading organization that people turn to track their carbon footprint and reduce it,” he said. Capper, who has worked on efforts to reduce emissions in BP’s supply chain, envisions a future where VYVE is on smartphones around the world. VYVE keeps things simple by focusing on emissions from transportation. Older carbon calculators required you to check last month’s energy bill or remember what you ate for lunch on Tuesday. VYVE is still testing out new features, but thousands of people in the United Kingdom and United States are already using it, said Mike Capper, the company’s founder. It’s backed by a subsidiary of BP called Launchpad, a venture capital-like group that funds low-carbon startups which might one day become billion-dollar companies - “unicorns” in startup lingo. That’s the real-life story of VYVE (rhymes with “five”), one of a handful of new carbon-tracking apps. Now imagine that app was funded by an oil company. As the number ballooned, the app would prompt you to assuage your guilt by buying carbon offsets - helping programs that promote biogas in Indonesia, cleaner cookstoves in Mexico, and tree-planting in the United Kingdom. You could watch the weight of your emissions grow as you drove to the store, took a bus to the park, or rode the train around town. If only there were an app that would let you track your personal carbon footprint in real-time, like a FitBit.
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