2025.03.04 吳柏瑤報告 – Cold Call: Time Theft as Avoided Emissions

Cold Call: Time Theft as Avoided Emissions is an unconventional carbon offsetting scheme that draws on strategies of worker sabotage and applies them in the context of high emission companies in the fossil fuel industry. Time theft is a strategy to deliberately slow productivity, where workers waste time and are therefore paid for periods of idleness. For example, fake sick days, sleeping on the job, extended lunch breaks, or engaging in non-work-related activities like social media or unrelated phone calls. In extractive industries where productivity remains firmly tethered to carbon emissions, sabotage is an effective strategy for emissions reductions.  

Cold Call is an installation that takes the form of a call center. Audiences are connected by telephone to executives in the fossil fuel industry and instructed to keep them on the phone as long as possible. The cumulative time stolen from these executives is then quantified as carbon credits, using an innovative new offsetting methodology. The project is powered by custom call center software that allows participants to make calls, learn about who they are calling, access call scripts and conversation ideas, and listen to recordings of calls that have already been made. A leader board tracks the total number and length of calls. To date, the longest call has stretched for over 39 minutes.