Weird, I was not expecting to see a list overwhelmingly dominated by oil and coal companies. I thought this list would be dominated by cell phone manufacturers who supplied power bricks with new phones.
I was expecting consumers using plastic straws at the top of the list.
If you’re curious about what do we do with all that carbon, here’s a handy diagram for you. It’s a clearly outdated, but I suspect it’s still roughly valid today. Energy production has since shifted towards renewables and transportation is gently sliding towards EVs, but there’s still a long way to go. Steel, concrete, and many other industries tends to change very slowly, so I suspect those emissions have stayed very similar to what they were back in 2016.
If you want to speed things up a bit, I suggest voting for the people who change the legislation accordingly. Businesses follow the money, so making polluting more expensive and eco-frienly options cheaper is the way to address this problem.
One of the big changes is in fugitive emmissions (basically leaky natural gas pipes), we found that fugitive emmissions were much (2-3x in north america) greater than expected, making natural gas as bad as coal in some scenarios. Turns out having o&g self report with no oversight leads to them underestimating their numbers.
Fixing leaking water pipes would be surprisingly effective too. We are already spending money and energy to purify and pump the water, so why not make use of it. Currently, we’re spending way too much energy on watering the trees growing next to big pipelines.
The article doesn’t contain the list, but I believe this is what they are referring to: https://carbonmajors.org/Entities
I smell bullshit. It’s almost entirely just a list of fossil fuel producers. That doesn’t really tell you who is using the end product and therefore driving the carbon production.
This is the best summary I could come up with:
This powerful cohort of state-controlled corporations and shareholder-owned multinationals are the leading drivers of the climate crisis, according to the Carbon Majors Database, which is compiled by world-renowned researchers.
This expansion, which has continued since, runs contrary to a stark warning by the International Energy Agency that no new oil and gas fields can be opened if the world is to stay within safe limits of global heating.
Climate scientists say global temperatures are rapidly approaching the lower Paris target of 1.5C above the pre-industrial era, with potentially dire consequences for people and the rest of nature.
Daan Van Acker, program manager at InfluenceMap, said many of the entities in the Carbon Majors database were moving in the wrong direction for climate stability.
He cites the proposal made by Mia Mottley, the prime minister of Barbados, for oil and gas companies to contribute at least 10 cents in every dollar to a loss and damage fund.
As examples, he cited the billboards that sprang up in Houston, Texas, after a hurricane that declared: “We Know Who Is To Blame” beside the names of oil companies, or the campaign in Vermont to create a climate superfund paid for by polluters that would allay the rising costs from floods, storms and heatwaves.
The original article contains 1,093 words, the summary contains 210 words. Saved 81%. I’m a bot and I’m open source!
Why do these evil companies make all this CO2.
What they doing with it? Just burning it for no reason?
Oh wait no they are selling it to consumers because consumers keep demanding it.
Consumers don’t really get a choice, I can’t choose to buy greener energy from my utility, and solar on my house is both expensive and less efficient than grid scale.
I don’t drive but my wife does, and switching to an EV would cost 10s of thousands of dollars, and not even save money because of higher taxes and insurance.
Make no mistake, these are policy issues.
Yet people won’t vote for a carbon tax, people don’t want more expensive petrol or roads, people don’t want subsidised public transport, people don’t want ban the suburbs, people won’t pay more for insulation, people won’t get heat pumps or induction hobs, or eat less meat. People just spend spend spend, consume consume consume. Happily taking whatever is sold to you.
But your right consumers have 0 choice.
In the majority of these cases, it is a small vocal minority that does these things, corporations have spent decades propgandizing that vehicles are the only way to get around, and changing that feels like an attack on mobility.
Also in my country none of these are hardly ever actually put up to vote by either party, so action feels very incremental during optimistic times, and glacial when it’s not.
It’s easy to blame consumers. We have too much junk and get a little endorphin boost when we buy more. But the reality is, evil companies are far, far worse than we know. Here’s a few reasons why:
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They often lobby to have our choices removed so we need to use their product. Coal energy hasn’t made financial sense in a long time, yet we still use it.
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Evil companies will do anything to save even pennies. Paper companies dumped pcbs directly into rivers for decades. At the consumer level, we didn’t know this was happening. They have lobbied to push back against EPA regulations like CAFE
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The recycling logo gets put all plastics… Even though most of it isn’t actually recyclable. Again, a mirage from evil companies.
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Mergers have shrunk our choices further. Almost everything in the grocery store down to just 10 companies.
I could go on, but the point is that at the consumer level we often don’t have a choice. Or there’s too much smoke behind the scenes for us to make an informed choice. Companies are polluting because it makes them more money, not because it saves us any.
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I agree that it’s important to understand that companies don’t just make waste for fun. They supply a product that people demand. That’s not to say those dirty companies are free of responsibility, but rather to understand that consumer choices do have an effect. We, as consumers, can’t just throw our hands in the air and say “but I am just 1 person, I have no measurable effect on pollution when we have container ships and oil ops producing 10 million times more greenhouse gas” without acknowledging that the demand for petroleum and ultra cheap widgets is the driver of those businesses. Its a social problem that we need to work together to solve. Honestly, I bet apathy towards the problem by pretending ships and rigs are autonomous wanderers is a viral campaign funded by the offenders themselves. If they’re gonna have a bad image, may as well try to keep demand up on a personal level.
