The implication is that this is an eminently manageable problem: identify, measure and isolate the variables responsible for a situation, then address them.
But the data released in a new report does not, as usual, finger the usual institutions in the usual nations. In fact, it complicates matters by suggesting that the easy accusations and simplistic solutions based on traditional assumptions may no longer provide either the psychological comfort or the practical outcomes on which so many have depended for so long.
While the big energy and natural resource companies remain primary culprits and convenient targets, a number of government-owned enterprises in developing nations as well as wealthy western countries are apparently just as culpable. The point is not to cast blame so much as it is to reinforce the growing awareness that blame and responsibility are truly global, as uncomfortable as that knowledge may be. JL
Suzanne Goldenberg reports in Grist:
“There are all kinds of countries that have produced a tremendous amount of historical emissions that we do not normally talk about. We do not normally talk about Mexico or Poland or Venezuela. So then it’s not just rich versus poor, it is also producers versus consumers, and resource rich versus resource poor.”
The climate crisis of the 21st century has been caused largely by just 90 companies, which between them produced nearly two-thirds of the greenhouse gas emissions generated since the dawning of the industrial age, new research suggests.
The companies range from investor-owned firms — household names such as Chevron, Exxon, and BP — to state-owned and government-run firms.
The analysis, which was welcomed by the former Vice President Al Gore as a “crucial step forward,” found that the vast majority of the firms were in the business of producing oil, gas, or coal. The findings have been accepted for publication in the journal Climatic Change.
“There are thousands of oil, gas, and coal producers in the world,” said climate researcher and author Richard Heede at the Climate Accountability Institute in Colorado. “But the decisionmakers, the CEOs, or the ministers of coal and oil if you narrow it down to just one person, they could all fit on a Greyhound bus or two.”
Half of the estimated emissions were produced just in the past 25 years — well past the date when governments and corporations became aware that rising greenhouse gas emissions from the burning of coal and oil were causing dangerous climate change.
Many of the same companies are also sitting on substantial fossil fuel reserves which — if they are burned — puts the world at even greater risk of dangerous climate change.
Climate change experts said the data set was the most ambitious effort so far to hold individual carbon producers, rather than governments, to account.
The United Nations climate change panel, the IPCC, warned in September that at current rates the world stood within 30 years of exhausting its “carbon budget” — the amount of carbon dioxide it could emit without going into the danger zone above 2 degrees C warming. Gore said the new carbon accounting could reset the debate about allocating blame for the climate crisis.
Leaders meeting in Warsaw for the U.N. climate talks this week clashed repeatedly over which countries bore the burden for solving the climate crisis — historic emitters such as America or Europe or the rising economies of India and China.
Gore in his comments said the analysis underlined that it should not fall to governments alone to act on climate change.
“This study is a crucial step forward in our understanding of the evolution of the climate crisis. The public and private sectors alike must do what is necessary to stop global warming,” Gore told the Guardian. “Those who are historically responsible for polluting our atmosphere have a clear obligation to be part of the solution.”
Between them, the 90 companies on the list of top emitters produced 63 percent of the cumulative global emissions of industrial carbon dioxide and methane between 1751 to 2010, amounting to about 914 gigatons of CO2 emissions, according to the research. All but seven of the 90 were energy companies producing oil, gas, and coal. The remaining seven were cement manufacturers.
The list of 90 companies included 50 investor-owned firms — mainly oil companies with widely recognized names such as Chevron, Exxon, BP, and Royal Dutch Shell, and coal producers such as British Coal Corp, Peabody Energy, and BHP Billiton.
Some 31 of the companies that made the list were state-owned companies such as Saudi Arabia’s Saudi Aramco, Russia’s Gazprom, and Norway’s Statoil.
Nine were government-run industries, producing mainly coal in countries such as China, the former Soviet Union, North Korea, and Poland, the host of climate talks.
Experts familiar with Heede’s research and the politics of climate change said they hoped the analysis could help break the deadlock in international climate talks.
“It seemed like maybe this could break the logjam,” said Naomi Oreskes, professor of the history of science at Harvard.
Climate scientist Michael Mann said he hoped the list would bring greater scrutiny to oil and coal companies’ deployment of their remaining reserves. “What I think could be a game changer here is the potential for clearly fingerprinting the sources of those future emissions,” he said. “It increases the accountability for fossil fuel burning. You can’t burn fossil fuels without the rest of the world knowing about it.”
Others were less optimistic that a more comprehensive accounting of the sources of greenhouse gas emissions would make it easier to achieve the emissions reductions needed to avoid catastrophic climate change.
John Ashton, who served as U.K,’s chief climate change negotiator for six years, suggested that the findings reaffirmed the central role of fossil fuel producing entities in the economy.
“The challenge we face is to move in the space of not much more than a generation from a carbon-intensive energy system to a carbon-neutral energy system. If we don’t do that, we stand no chance of keeping climate change within the 2 degrees C threshold,” Ashton said.
“By highlighting the way in which a relatively small number of large companies are at the heart of the current carbon-intensive growth model, this report highlights that fundamental challenge.”
Meanwhile, Oreskes, who has written extensively about corporate-funded climate denial, noted that several of the top companies on the list had funded the climate denial movement.
“For me one of the most interesting things to think about was the overlap of large scale producers and the funding of disinformation campaigns, and how that has delayed action,” she said.
The data represents eight years of exhaustive research into carbon emissions over time, as well as the ownership history of the major emitters.
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