Just 57 companies linked to 80% of greenhouse gas emissions since 2016
theguardian.com
theguardian.com
It's also completely burying the lede: the actual reported data at hand is the line still going up, and states increasingly account for the increase compared to "real" companies which are on a downturn. Which is kinda but not specifically related to exactly how many boardrooms are involved.
It could change something if we forced them to compete on how much of CO2 they emit for MWh.
Too big to fail is a terrible direction to move towards.
The main superpower that companies have is that they can die and be replaced by others doing better.
A carbon tax basically does this but at an economy-wide level, and allows us to play off fossil fuel companies against EV companies, rather than just playing off Shell vs BP, for instance.
(Concrete production uses petrochemicals as chemicals, not as fuel. Well, often as fuel too, but…)
In my mind that would be dramatically better for a ton of reasons.
More competition.
Less ability to hire huge legal teams.
Less ability to influence elections.
Less ability to influence laws and regulation.
And those things would make it easier for us to force them to cut their greenhouse emissions.
The issue here isn't blame. The issue is at what level do we start making shit illegal to where it's most effective at affecting the desired change.
Blame doesn't solve anything, other than maybe making some subset of people feel good.
Your idea is to stop the wasteful SUVs by making oil production illegal, and letting each user figure out how to replace it. My guess is that the hospitals will scream that they really need diesel for their emergency backup power, and nothing will come of it.
Your idea is to ban production of concrete, and each customer will figure out an alternative. I predict the same fate with different details.
Your … it's like this for every sector. Basically, a ban on production leads to the widest possible coalition against the ban, including extremely popular institutions like hospitals, who really need diesel but hardly ever burn it. Politically it's a pessimal strategy.
I fail to see how my feelings are relevant to the discussion.
I’d prefer we figure out ways to grow ourselves out of the problem through technology (renewables, EVs and trains, battery storage, etc) but hey, people need their SuperDuty pickups.
We need to persistently transition in a co-ordinated and disciplined way, and we need to do it faster. We need to do it. Individually, politically, economically.
How? You can't simultaneously say "we can't boycott the foundations of our economy" and also say "it's on us".
What can the layman do?
Hey, let's run through a thought exercise. Is Darren Woods, CEO of Exxon-Mobil for 7 years, more directly responsible for greenhouse gas emissions, prevalent misinformation campaigns, suppression of alternative energy and EVs, active lobbying against carbon taxes, with a private/company jet, I'm assuming at least a 8,000 sq ft house and likely numerous other properties, etc.
or... is an Inuit or African living a subsistence existence not far from what humans have lived for several thousand years without catastrophic warming?
Of COURSE it is everyone's problem, because the first world countries who profligately burned fossil fuels for 150 years while gaining global supremacy have visited upon the world environmental misery and perhaps total biosphere collapse.
But who's responsible? Yeah, a lot easier to figure out if the responsible parties weren't the ones in power.
Now WHY IS THAT? Oh right, because we've all internalized the limited liability corporation, as if it is some physical law or biological reality. It's not, it's a social construct that happened to work well for externalizing costs on the rest of humanity, with the assumption that there's no blowback.
You marry the limited liability corporation with the "science" that is economics and the total certainty they have applying sociopathic game theory to complex nonlinear reality that conveniently can't tell me: "how much should we tax carbon?" much less any of a host of other questions that might guide policy in the coming age of scarcity and environmental degradation.
If economics can't measure it, it doesn't exist in their science. Which suits the limited liability corporation, which can pollute and destroy with near-complete writ large.
However articles like this propagate the illusion that it's somebody else's fault and therefore not our problem. It's our problem. We are consuming all of this oil and gas through the services and products we use. We still want those services and products but we're not accepting the responsibility for it.
With cars it's even more direct than that. We are the ones that are actually burning that oil. Exxon might sell us the oil, but we're setting it on fire, literally.
Your reply uses a strawman, the argument has never been that a company has less influence than a single customer. The argument is that a company is very often (unless it is a complete monopoly over a non-substitutable good) not as powerful as the consumers (as a group).
Companies can do some of the work, but the only reason they're not going bankrupt is because millions of consumers tell them everyday "we need your products, we don't want to change our behavior".
And in the future we should have nuclear fusion too. A lot sooner if we started investing serious money into it.
It's as meaningless as blaming China for high emissions. Yes, the country is the number one CO2 producer, so what? What if we divide China into two or three smaller countries? Whould that make China drop from the first place? Yes. Would that actually change anything? No.
It's the consumer who decides to buy stuff they crave but don't actually need. You want a new laptop/phone/car/whatever because the old one is missing a single feature? Then take responsibility for your actions and don't blame companies that are just doing what you paid them to do.
It is literally a useless statistic. And if you actually draw the logical conclusion from it, then most companies have ZERO emissions, since they dig nothing out of the ground. Counting emissions twice makes no sense, so if you count the producer you can't also count the producer.