Major Australian bank now tracks customers’ 'carbon footprints'
A new mobile app feature from Australia’s Commonwealth Bank tracks the carbon footprints of its customers based on their transactions. The app then analyzes the customer’s carbon footprint, including how many trees were destroyed by the customer’s behavior. According to the Daily Mail, the customer is notified within the app and is offered the opportunity to pay a fee to offset their harm to the environment.
The technology was developed by CoGo, an environmental tech startup which builds similar products for individuals and businesses for internal use. CoGo currently offers a similar app in which individuals can connect their bank account and learn how many carbon emissions they are guilty of based on their transactions. On its website, CoGo admits that without knowing exactly which items you purchase, it must “assume” your carbon footprint.
“By combining our rich customer data and CoGo's industry-leading capability in measuring carbon outputs, we will be able to provide greater transparency for customers so that they can take actionable steps to reduce their environmental footprint,” CommBank Group executive Angus Sullivan said in a statement.
“Our data capability will provide greater personalisation for customers overtime [sic], including more granular information about their carbon footprint with the option to offset individual transactions.”
As for the fee customers are offered by Commonwealth Bank to pay for changing the weather, it is unclear who is the end recipient of the fee, what it is used for, if any individual or business profits from this fee, or how exactly the fee is used to repair the environment. Neither Commonwealth Bank nor CoGo immediately responded to America’s Frontline News request for answers to these questions.
The app feature is not the first of its kind. America’s Frontline News reported that Dutch bank Robobank already rolled out a mobile application earlier this year called Carbon Insights in which bank customers can track their CO2 impact with each purchase. In August, Rabo Carbon Bank CEO Barbara Baarsma proposed a limit be placed on citizens’ carbon emissions, which would be tracked via their transactions and purchases. People would then be able to sell any unused “carbon credits” to others.
In May, Chinese company Alibaba Group announced at the World Economic Forum (WEF) that it was working on similar technology which would track humans’ activities and gauge how much carbon they were emitting. The WEF’s vision for 2030 is that “polluters will have to pay to emit carbon dioxide. There will be a global price on carbon.”
This carbon tracking technology is a big step towards realizing the WEF's vision, which Dr. Aaron Kheriaty illustrated in a series of tweets.
“Imagine a few years hence you receive the following text on your phone,” he wrote on Twitter.
“A notification explains that your carbon footprint is 23% above others in your age/race category in your geographic region. It informs you that you have eighteen months to transition to an electric vehicle; otherwise, you will be taxed an additional $0.90 per gallon of gas. While that gas tax is steep, you default to that ‘option’ because you cannot afford an electric vehicle. After another six months, you receive another notification that your individualized carbon footprint tax will double to $1.80 per gallon of gas...which hurts even more but does not change your financial prospects for a new electric car. A year later, an algorithm in the cloud decides that, since you have still not converted to an electric vehicle, you now simply cannot buy gas.”
The medical ethics expert then noted how this has already begun to be deployed during the pandemic, chiefly with the use of vaccine passports.
“The biomedical security state will soon have the infrastructure in place for policies of this kind, including digital IDs and central bank digital currencies,” he concluded. “These will be tied to digital health passport systems already tested and deployed during the pandemic.”
