Is the World Economic Forum (WEF) planning to force people to observe "personal carbon allowances," legally restricting the amount of carbon emissions that individuals might generate during their daily activities? No, that's not true: The claim misrepresents an opinion piece that appeared on the WEF's website in 2022. The article proposes creating incentives for people to monitor their behavior vis-à-vis emissions; it does not urge governments to track individuals and the amount of carbon they generate. Moreover, the WEF's communications chief told Lead Stories that no such scheme exists.
The claim appeared in a video (archived here) on TikTok on January 24, 2024, under a Hungarian-language caption that reads "The vaccine passport was just a taste of what's to come." (Translation from Hungarian to English by Lead Stories staff). The video shows a segment from an interview (archive here) that Israeli-Australian commentator Efrat Fenigson (archived here) conducted in English with Dutch influencer Eva Vlaardingerbroek (archived here), posted to YouTube on December 4, 2023. The two women discuss a purported plot for governments to step up control over individual behavior, and Fenigson says:
For everyone that may think that something we said here is a conspiracy theory, you should go to the WEF website and look for 'personal carbon allowance' and you'll find the document that they have about personal carbon allowances! It talks exactly about that. You are going to be monitored for every step, every transaction, every consumption habit you have because it's all tied in to the climate agenda.
This is what the post looked like on TikTok at the time of writing:
(Source: TikTok screenshot taken on Fri Jan 26 13:28:33 2024 UTC)
Lead Stories took Fenigson's advice and conducted a search for the keywords "personal carbon allowances" on the WEF's website on January 26, 2024 (archived here). The only result was an opinion piece published on September 14, 2022, (archived here) whose lead author is Kunal Kumar (archived here), an official in India's Ministry of Housing and Urban Affairs.
Kumar's article does not urge authorities to monitor individual transactions or consumption habits for the sake of combatting climate change, as Fenigson claims. Rather, it argues that people in developed economies have demonstrated a willingness to modify their carbon-generating activities, and that new technology can help them:
There have been numerous examples of personal carbon allowance programs in discussions for the last two decades, however they had limited success due to a lack of social acceptance, political resistance, and a lack of awareness... Innovative AI and machine-learning capabilities would help capture embedded emissions in goods and services, and could help in providing individuals with tailored and timely advice on how to reduce their lifestyle emissions.
The closest the article comes to advocating government coercion is by proposing that "public-private partnerships" could help spawn a "social movement" whose goals include the "setting of acceptable levels of personal emissions."
Moreover, the WEF is not telling governments to enforce Kumar's ideas, head of media Yann Zopf (archived here) told Lead Stories in an email on January 26, 2024. He wrote:
The World Economic Forum never suggested to impose a 'personal carbon allowance.' This is false information created to discredit the important work that the World Economic Forum does on serious global challenges.
