The article claims that a PR campaign "popularized" the term "carbon footprint" in 2000. That's pretty vague and I'm not going to dispute it. The article doesn't claim BP coined the phrase.
In German, it's more common to refer to an ecological footprint, its usage which goes back to at least 1992, and it wasn't coined by a PR company, but by very straight laced environmentalists.
https://journals.sagepub.com/doi/10.1177/095624789200400212
