A while back, The “Guardian” published a misleading headline saying that 71% of global warming is caused by 100 companies, which then was leading a lot of people towards inaction and “enh not my problem”.
However, here was the problem: The study did not assess all sources of global emissions worldwide (which includes agriculture, transportation, buildings’ heating and cooling systems) but rather only analyzed the output of fossil-fuel producers, specifically.
In other words, that “71% of global warming is caused by 100 companies” claim that was going around is not true.
Here’s what’s going on: a study looked at companies (including state actors) producing oil, gas, coal and cement, and then calculated out that within this particular sector, 100 companies did 71% of the harm.
And those companies are indeed super bad and we need to stop them as soon as possible.
In addition, there are other causes of climate change like transport, housing and food. Here, the richest need to change the most! Storm the palace! But everyone’s life is gonna have to change.
We live in a world where wealth is unequally divided. What’s worse is a lot of the wealth is illusory, a lie built on fake numbers. The robber barons of the past stole from our future.
And even though we only see one-thousandth of that treasure hoard, a lot of what we’ve got is just as illusory and stolen and unsustainable.
When or if a real reckoning comes a lot of what we take for granted every day is not gonna be there for us.
It’s true that the fossil fuel companies have been driving a fake-ass “it’s all consumer’s fault” campaign (including inventing the term “carbon footprint”) in order to divert blame from themselves.
I was talking to a guy who sold cigarettes in his store even though he was so opposed to smoking. He was like “We’re giving the people what they want.” Now, he wasn’t 100% in control of what got put into the store, which might’ve been a better argument than that one, because when people are in a circle of blame, as consumers, corporations, and policy-makers are all blaming each other, then it’s hard to get out.
Part of the truth is that even after our li’l hep crowd here manage to stop consuming entirely and just live on breadcrumbs and ocean mist and zero-waste subsistence farming, the Earth would still be in danger because the bad guys could still keep on blasting just as much, and they’d figure out even more ways to spend or waste that energy. So we do need system-level change.
But that’s not the whole of the truth because I know we could be making it a lot worse. We could be driving around in cars and throwing plastic bottles in the lake or whatever. We could start blasting just as much as those scumhecks do. And if we can make it worse, that means our own behavior and choices do matter and that I want to choose to try to not make it worse. So we do need consumer-choices–level change.
We absolutely need policy-level change and regulation that can be enforced in a way that industry and billionaires have to obey.
And getting ready for such change is one thing we can start doing today, while we’re pushing for such change.
Alex links to more Guardian do-nothing propaganda:
By the same logic, says Hillman, national action is also irrelevant “because Britain’s contribution is minute. Even if the government were to go to zero carbon it would make almost no difference.”
I could not disagree more with that Mayor Hillman attitude. Straight outta the discourses of climate delay textbook. “What can we, poor li’l Britain do? We’re only restarting fracking, rejecting wind farms, and squeezing every last cubic inch of gas from the North Sea.”
Only the collapse will bring about the change in behaviour required.
That’s too late. Like the algae under the blood red soot-flaked sky or the dead snow sparrows in the frozen-over Northern wastes are gonna be like “hmm let’s factor in externalities next time we cook up some economics for our tribes”.
We need change now, not later.