Such a tedious stat. Because nearly all greenhouse gas emissions are from energy, it's a measure of energy-sector corporate consolidation. If we exploded all energy companies into millions of tiny companies each with a single oil or gas well, but overall production is the same, would that change anything? If they accelerated the merging into one behemoth gigacorp, but extraction was the same, is that worse or better?

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.

> If we exploded all energy companies into millions of tiny companies each with a single oil or gas well, but overall production is the same, would that change anything?

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.

>It could change something if we forced them to compete on how much of CO2 they emit for MWh.

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.

The problem is that large, strong companies can force regulators to issue as many allowances as they need. When companies are smaller the competition makes this kind of lobbying harder. So the fact that global emmisions have such consolidated source is important and alarming.

I rather like at least one aspect of this consolidation: If just a few companies dominate concrete production, that means that they can deploy carbon capture quicker than if eleventy companies had to run some n pilots each and eventually decide to scale the results to their entire fleet.

(Concrete production uses petrochemicals as chemicals, not as fuel. Well, often as fuel too, but…)

It would change things. These few megacorps are super-powerful and have the ability not only to successfully change the law through lobbying, but are the reason the world is outputting so much greenhouse gases. Companies like Shell are calling oil "deep water energy" to make it more palatable while still extracting oil as cost-efficiently as possible.

> If we exploded all energy companies into millions of tiny companies each with a single oil or gas well, but overall production is the same, would that change anything?

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.

8 Billion humans linked to 100% of greenhouse gas emissions. I absolutely think companies should be expected to make credible and persistent efforts to reduce their greenhouse gas emissions, but we are the ones buying their products and services. That's on us too. Businesses are composed of people doing jobs. Do we want goods and services? The question is how we manage all of this.

Expecting 8 Billion humans to get together and not buy products which are bad for the environment is unrealistic. You can barely get any three people to agree on any one topic.

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 is a big issue though. No one is willing to take responsibility for their own behaviors which means ultimately nothing gets done. People will just keep buying bigger cars, taking more international vacations, consuming more single use plastics because "its someone else's problem."

I mean sure. Fine. Lets blame consumers for making poor choices. Done. Now what? The world is still polluted and getting worse by the day.

Blame doesn't solve anything, other than maybe making some subset of people feel good.

Consumers have the same access to goods in both the US and Europe, but Americans have a much higher carbon footprint.

Let me see if I understand this correctly.

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.

None of those are my idea, but feel free to continue believing they are if that makes you feel better.

I intuit that it doesn't make you feel better, or feel good. Is that correct? If so, why?

What is this? a high concept "u mad bro"?

I fail to see how my feelings are relevant to the discussion.

The best thing anyone can do for the planet is not have children. By a huge margin. A few generations on and there will be far fewer consumers if more people were to embrace this idea.

Or following that misanthropic logic to its conclusion, perhaps we should do nothing at all, and let pollution run rampant. That way, humanity will eliminate itself, and the biosphere will return to normal within a few million years.

Shut down the nuclear plants and bury the waste as best as possible first, but yes that’s an option as well.

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.

There's lots of things we should be doing as a species, but realistically speaking a somehow global, human-wide effort to boycott will never, ever work.

Boycotting doesn't make any sense, it's not possible, we can't boycott the foundations of our own current economy. It's our economy, we need to take responsibility for it. The fossil fuels companies definitely need more heavy regulation, but they're also powering our civilization. That's on us. Articles like this encourage the myth that this isn't our fault and we can safely blame some bad guys, feel smug and carry on because it's their fault, not ours.

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.

> That's on us.

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?

Is that the most hellacious whataboutism ever or just depraved statistical mendacity?

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.

Exxon are not making credible, persistent efforts to reduce greenhouse gas emissions so screw them.

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.

>We are consuming all of this oil and gas through the services and products we use.

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.

The reason the Guardian now uses "linked to" instead of "responsible for" (which Oxfam used half a decade ago and got ridiculed for years for) is precisely because of what you call "whataboutism" (which it really isn't).

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".

0.8bln linked to more than 50% of all CO2 emitted so far and more that 25% of current emissions.

Nuclear power. Zero emissions and you can reprocess the waste, vitrify what little remains and store it below stable seabeds that haven't moved in 100 million years.

And in the future we should have nuclear fusion too. A lot sooner if we started investing serious money into it.

This is so stupid. It's not even that these companies produce the emissions, they are merely the people digging it out of the ground.

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.

I don't see the point. In the end it's always the consumer who wants to buy stuff from the companies.

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.