Are 100 Companies Doing 71% of the Emitting?
Or is a misleading title giving us an all too easy target?
Four years ago, The Guardian published an article titled ‘Just 100 companies responsible for 71% of global emissions, study says.’ It is based on the 2017 Carbon Majors Report. The article omits some key points from the report, but the main issue I have is with the title itself and the first sentence of the text: “Just 100 companies have been the source of more than 70% of the world’s greenhouse gas emissions since 1988, according to a new report.”
The report itself does not use the words ‘responsible’ and ‘source’ in this way. Instead, it says things like ‘traced to’ and ‘linked to’. With the language that The Guardian author uses you can get the wrong impression about what the data actually say, especially if you don’t read the rest of the article.
The fact that the only thing that gets quoted is the title like it speaks for itself, is a problem. Once you start paying attention you start seeing it quoted everywhere, often in arguments minimizing the importance of personal responsibility. It’s an impressive number. It catches our attention. What’s the point of personal responsibility if 100 companies are doing most of the emitting? If we could just put a stop to that, wouldn’t the problem be pretty much solved? Oh those evil corporations, they’re ruining everything.
I wish it was that simple.
When I saw that Guardian headline I got this itch. I mean think about it. How many companies are there in the world? And how many other sources of emissions? Why are so few reacting with ‘Wait a minute, how’s that even possible?’ or ‘How does that break down?’ When I looked it up I found this article by Treehugger that explains the issue pretty well, but I kept coming across the above quote, including here on Medium, so I decided to write something myself to help spread the word.
If you have the time, I suggest reading the study for yourself, but here’s what I got from it. The list of 100 companies is comprised of fossil fuel producers, many of which are state actors. Number one and two are China’s coal production and Saudi Aramco. All the emissions caused by the consumption of the fuels by the rest of our civilization are included in that 71% that they are considered ‘responsible’ for in The Guardian’s language. They are the bulk of it. So if the gasoline you put in your car comes from Shell, then the CO2 you’re emitting by driving around is added to the emissions Shell is responsible for, because that’s where it can be traced back to. All the Russian gas burned in Europe by European companies or households is added to Gazprom’s ledger. So it’s not Gazprom doing the bulk of the emitting, but the report attributes it to them and The Guardian calls them responsible.
It’s easy to get lost in the numbers and it’s easy to ignore the ones that break down what the title actually means. It’s about where the fossil fuels we burn as a society originate, and it attributes that burning to the producers of the fuel. 90% of that 71% is consumer-driven. It’s the fuels used by other industries. It’s the fuel in airplanes, ships, and trucks. It’s the roughly 1.37 billion cars on the roads. It’s the gas that heats our homes and fuels our cooking stoves. It’s the coal that’s burned to generate electricity. The list goes on and on.
It’s easy to blame corporations for our troubles, and they play a big role, but the main cause of the problem is that capitalist industrialization based on accumulation has developed our society to be fossil-fuel dependent, and we don’t know how to do without. Many of us want to transition away from fossil fuels. We like that idea, but we also want to keep all the stuff that fossil fuels have made possible. And it’s everywhere.
Fossil fuel companies are problematic for a number of reasons. They are symbolic of what’s wrong with our civilization. The classic capitalist baddies who, for decades, have been churning out propaganda to obfuscate how the burning of fossil fuels on an ever-increasing scale is a collective civilizational suicide pact. They’re fueling and encouraging our destruction for short-term corporate profits.
At the same time though, are they the ones burning all those fuels? It’s not the mining of the coal that’s doing all the emitting, is it? It’s the burning of it. Sure there are emissions coming from oil extraction, but way less than from all the combustion down the line by those who consume it. This is what this report shows explicitly.
These fossil fuel corporations should be heavily criticized, especially for suppressing climate science, for spreading disinformation, for trying and succeeding to corrupt democracy and its legislative processes in their favor, and for doing everything they can to prevent meaningful change as they did at COP 26 where they had the largest delegation.
In my opinion, they should be regulated into extinction while the subsidies they’ve collected for so long should be stopped, and the money redirected towards the decarbonizing of society. Using it to develop the zero-emissions public-transport system of the future does not seem like a bad place to start. I also think it’s high time we made ecocide a crime under international law, and not wait too long with starting to demand reparations from those who have personally profited from the destruction. I write ‘we’, but of course it’s those most affected by climate change who need and deserve those reparations.
But, all this being the case, does it really feel adequate to blame the producer of the fuel for everything that is done with it? To me, it doesn’t. The whole culture has to change. It feels a bit hypocritical to hold up signs that say ‘leave the oil in the ground’ while filling our lives with stuff that can’t exist without it.
We won’t have a future if extraction and production are not heavily regulated and scaled-down globally. And as long as we, the people, allow corporations to have the power they have over the legislative processes that are supposed to regulate them, and as long as they’re allowed to own politicians trained to do their bidding, we are most definitely screwed. But it’s also not hard to see why things aren’t changing very fast if you see that demand for what they sell keeps growing.
It’s like knowing your drug dealer is screwing you and you’ll likely end up overdosing, but you keep going back because you’re addicted and you can’t help yourself, and then when you come down, you complain that the dealer has all the power.
When people see the line ‘100 companies responsible for 71% of emissions’ standing on its own, the way it, for instance, comes on the screen in the documentary ‘The New Corporation’, we think it means what it sounds like. If that’s the only bit of information coming out of this study that gets legs of its own while all the rest is left behind, then people end up misled. It becomes a slogan that gives people a target. It gives us someone to blame, and it allows us to not feel too bad about how our lives and our society are structured. It allows us to keep going, not make too many changes, and point at the others who have to change to fix things. I think it’s counterproductive.
There’s no hiding from the fact that everything has to change if we want well-being, thriving, and even survival for sentient life to remain a realistic objective. How these corporations operate, how the economic system incentivizes them, how the political system supports them, how our society craves what they produce and how our lives are built up around it, all of it has to change. Making the producers accountable is important, but not enough.
We are all complicit to some degree or another. So, as much as we can we should join the movements that demand change in politics and legislation, and the more changes we can make in our own lives to be less complicit, the better. Sure, one individual can’t make a whole lot of difference, but joined together we can.
