Just 90 companies caused two-thirds of man-made global warming emissions

[kristopher]

Just 90 companies caused two-thirds of man-made global warming emissions
Chevron, Exxon and BP among companies most responsible for climate change since dawn of industrial age, figures show

• Interactive - which fossil fuel companies are most responsible?

Suzanne Goldenberg, US environment correspondent

theguardian.com, Wednesday 20 November 2013 11.07 EST


Oil, coal and gas companies are contributing to most carbon emissions, causing climate change and some are also funding denial campaigns. Photograph: David Gray/Reuters
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, found the analysis, which has been accepted for publication in the journal Climatic Change.

"There are thousands of oil, gas and coal producers in the world," climate researcher and author Richard Heede at the Climate Accountability Institute in Colorado said. "But the decision makers, 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 ...

http://www.theguardian.com/environment/2013/nov/20/90-companies-man-made-global-warming-emissions-climate-change

[Scuba]

1. And Republicans want to end corporate taxes.

[NickB79]

2. Slight correction to that title

7 billion people, consuming the products of just 90 companies, caused two-thirds of man-made global warming emissions.

These companies exist because they have customers willing to buy their goods and services. That would be us, all of us.

[CRH]

3. Half the estimated emissions were produced in the past 25 years, ...

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.

This is why I have trouble with accepting our doom can be explained in our DNA or the maximum power principle. Governments and corporations have known the risk and placed every possible hurdle in front of climate negotiations from the first meeting in the late eighties. On the flip side, the desire of the willing emotional consumer has been exploited not just in culture and economy, but the politics as well. We had a choice to curtail the cause of our present distress, and find mitigation solutions. Instead we collectively chose our emotional comfort over unborn humanity's, future.

Even in the present, we reaffirm our devotion to consumption with the newest toy, car, fad, ... fill in the blank. Nary a thought of change if it effects our present comfort or desire.

[kristopher]

5. That doesn't make a bit of sense.

1) Those 90 companies are serving the interests of a small fraction of the world's population. To acribe blame to those who have nothing is absurd.

2) What customers are willing to buy has little to do with the political and economic power that controls the range of products made available to be purchased. The dominant market players CAN AND HAVE used their economic and political power to limit the range of choices available to consumers.
Without the active exercise of that power, problems that the public cares about (and the public does care about climate change) would be debated, and a values based political decision would be made to guide us s to more sustainable products and practices.

[CRH]

6. I know your response was not to me, ...

but just a couple of comments that represent a slightly different approach.

I don't feel most people who have studied climate change place much of the blame on the third world, who live mostly hand to mouth. The disproportionate use of hydrocarbons is the first, and to a lesser extent, second world economies. Third world economies are much more subsistence and tend to utilize wood and other biomass for fuel. This does set into motion other problems that contribute to climate change, like deforestation and some less than optimum agriculture practices, but who can really blame people trying to survive poverty?

I think the comments about the 'willing consumers' stems from lifestyles far in excess of needs, that use a lion share of the carbon. It is not just in what we choose to buy, but heating a 3000 sq/ft house for a family of four, sixty miles from work.

As to the dominate market players using political and economic power to limit the public's choices, I agree totally. It would be very different today if solar, geo thermal, hydro, and wind; had been given the incentives, grants, and tax breaks that nuclear and fossil fuel industries have been given for R&D, the past sixty years. Instead there has been a steady suppression of both funding and venue.

The same can be said for the support and subsidies for the corporate farm, while small farmers and organic practitioners have not just had no funding, but had a legislative and regulatory war thrust upon them my corporations. This has affected everything from the crops they have tried to grow, to developing the markets, to securing water.

The last point as well, has limited public choice. The privatization of everything from public education to the electric grid. Half of the problem for renewables is not in the technology, but rather in the corporate perception that they own the grid. Thirty five years ago the grid was a patchwork of public utilities run by PUC's, now the grid is managed out of corporate boardrooms devising schemes to maximize profits and minimize competition. What should be a national public infrastructure has until recently been a gift to energy corporations for their maladministration and upkeep, limited by profit margins.

edit: for spelling and grammar

[NickB79]

7. It is not a "small fraction"

There isn't a country on Earth, no matter it's economic status, that isn't part of the global clusterfuck that is climate change and resource depletion. Those in less developed nations that aren't directly buying the goods of these 90 companies are often working to provide the raw materials FOR those company's factories, either directly or indirectly.

The countries that aren't already up to their eyeballs in the consumer culture are striving to EMULATE the countries that already are. China and India are, for all intents and purposes, striving to emulate the consumption-based economy of the US. African and South American countries aren't far behind.

With regard to your second point, that's a cop-out. Consumers often have the choice of simply not buying what's offered, or choosing to spend a bit extra to buy a similar product made in a more sustainable fashion. The fact that most do not, or cannot, shows how deep in the shit we currently are. This was the basis for the Occupy Wallstreet movement (that pretty much crumbled as the apathetic sat on the sidelines). If GliderGuider were present in this thread, he'd probably say it represents an example of humans being biologically hardwired to only look at short-term problems, the future be damned. It also shows, IMO, how market-based approaches to tackling climate change are far too shallow in impact to prevent us from breaking the 2C line in the near future.

[GliderGuider]

8. Someone called? :-)

Yes, that's what I would say. In fact I'd go much further than that (who could have guessed?) I think that human beings are hard-wired six ways from Sunday. Virtually all of our decisions have large unconscious, emotion-based components that come up from our evolved neural circuits (our hard-wiring) and implant themselves into our thought patterns before our consciousness even sees them. Most of the time our consciousness will not see them at all - it can't, because the mental patterns seem to be just part of our natural internal landscape.

This unconsciousness has implications well beyond the steep risk discount rates you refer to. Similar wiring also drives things like mate selection to social status seeking, and governs the expression of our beliefs as actions. There are, as far as I can tell, virtually no aspects of human thought or behavior that are free of this hard-wired input. And that emphatically includes purchasing decisions, which are largely based on the status content of the item being purchased. Advertisers know this, and manipulate our social status/self-esteem circuitry through the use of images, which bypass our rational minds and speak directly to our wiring. The motive of the sellers is, of course, to increase their own status by getting us to buy their products.

I don't think "market solutions" will work because of that. Sellers and buyers both want to maximize their status - the sellers by selling, the buyers by buying, and the more transactions take place the more status is enhanced on both sides. Everybody wins except those purchasers who can't afford what's on sale. That hits their self-esteem and diminishes their perceived social status, and their brains are wired to remove that distress by finding a way to obtain the status-fetish.

This is one of the reasons the concept of the growth economy is seen as good, natural and inevitable - the impulse for growth is buried deep in our unconscious, at the level of social status and self-esteem. Markets sell goods and services, but as far as our brains are concerned, they sell status. The general human desire for increased status is essentially a bottomless pit - we will take as much of it as we can buy or steal.

It all goes a long way toward explaining the behavior of "low-status" developing nations when they rub up against high-status industrial markets. I don't think we can short-circuit this impulse as long as markets exist - it's simply evolutionary psychology at work. IMO anyone who thinks we can tinker this Hydra into submission doesn't understand how the human brain works.

An introduction into the evolutionary psychology of social status:
http://www.psychologytoday.com/blog/beautiful-minds/201008/two-routes-social-status

And a scientific paper on the limited role of consciousness:
http://www.frontiersin.org/Journal/10.3389/fpsyg.2013.00478/full

[Nihil]

9. Good point:

> Markets sell goods and services, but as far as our brains are concerned, they sell status.

(i.e., everything above & beyond basic water & food is a luxury and luxuries promote status.)

[kristopher]

10. Your view of accountability is waaay out on the fringe

These 90 companies have built enormous wealth and need to be targeted going forward.

You really sound like you are defending fossil fuel companies.

[Nihil]

12. Three sentences. One is correct and the other two are garbage.

> Your view of accountability is waaay out on the fringe

Garbage. His view is mainstream amongst environmentalists (if not economists).

> These 90 companies have built enormous wealth and need to be targeted going forward.

Correct. Totally correct.

> You really sound like you are defending fossil fuel companies.

Garbage. NickN79 has less of a history of defending fossil fuel companies that you do.
You might not like him for his pro-nuclear views but he has been more consistently
against natural gas (for example) than you have and a "fossil fuel defender" he isn't.


Your original statement was this:
>> Those 90 companies are serving the interests of a small fraction of the world's population

That is simply wrong.

"Those 90 companies are *owned by* a small (tiny, tiny) fraction of the world's population." Correct.

"Those 90 companies employ a small (globally small) fraction of the world's population." Correct.

"Those 90 companies directly benefit a small fraction of the world's population." Correct.

"The output of those 90 companies is serving the interests of a small fraction of the world's population." Wrong.

Target the primary fossil fuel companies (as you suggested in your 2nd statement) - not the people
who are fighting them.

[Nihil]

4. Whilst it's nice to pillory said CEOs/ministers (and they definitely deserve worse than that) ...

> 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.
> ...
> "But the decision makers, 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 ...

... one can't help thinking that perhaps the ever-growing, ever-greedier infestation of
consumers *might* *just* have something to do with it too ...

[cprise]

11. People are flooded with pro-consumption propaganda

every day of our lives. And its not just commercials- the stoking of consumerism worked its way into US government policy in the 1950s with the advent of Edward Bernays' PR techniques. Prosperity Gospel didn't catch on by accident, either. Influential conservative organizations like Heritage Foundation for decades have been targeting Christians with key themes with the intention of making Christianity 'safe' for capitalism.

Modesty and caution have been viewed as qualities that needed to be curtailed in the population. There are so many "live for today" messages in corporate ads and media over the last 40 years that the single-mindedness beggars belief.

[Nihil]

13. Agreed - very good post.

> People are flooded with pro-consumption propaganda every day of our lives.

That has been the case (as you note) for decades so it's not that surprising that the
multitudes of unthinking proles (cliche but accurate) are totally bought into the new
religion of "Consume!" even more than any of the older ones of "Repent!", "Hate!"
or "Conquer!".


> Modesty and caution have been viewed as qualities that needed to be curtailed
> in the population. There are so many "live for today" messages in corporate ads
> and media over the last 40 years that the single-mindedness beggars belief.

That is apparent in the simple case of the perversion of the term "Conservative".
If you "conserve" things these days you are regarded as a "hippy", a "liberal",
a "tree-hugger" (as if such things were bad anyway) while if you actively support
the destruction of everything that surrounds you, you somehow gain the title/epithet
of "Conservative".

Efficiency, reduction, recycling, re-use, ... all these things have been slandered
across all media as if the act of doing these things in public is somehow treasonous.



I try not to comment on people's personal beliefs but "Prosperity Gospel"?
How is that any less oxymoronic than "Military Intelligence" or "Republican Think-tank"?