Just 100 companies responsible for 71% of global emissions, study says (excerpt): The Guardian (3 years old but still relevant)

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Note: A three year old article but what has changed apart from some greenwashing?

A relatively small number of fossil fuel producers and their investors could hold the key to tackling climate change

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.

 

Exxon

The Carbon Majors Report (pdf) “pinpoints how a relatively small set of fossil fuel producers may hold the key to systemic change on carbon emissions,” says Pedro Faria, technical director at environmental non-profit CDP, which published the report in collaboration with the Climate Accountability Institute. 

Traditionally, large scale greenhouse gas emissions data is collected at a national level but this report focuses on fossil fuel producers. Compiled from a database of publicly available emissions figures, it is intended as the first in a series of publications to highlight the role companies and their investors could play in tackling climate change.

The report found that more than half of global industrial emissions since 1988 – the year the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change was established – can be traced to just 25 corporate and state-owned entities. The scale of historical emissions associated with these fossil fuel producers is large enough to have contributed significantly to climate change, according to the report.

Major investment firm dumps Exxon, Chevron and Rio Tinto stock (excerpt): The Guardian

"Storebrand says corporate lobbying to undermine climate solutions is ‘unacceptable’"

companies that use their political clout to block green policies

 "A Nordic hedge fund worth more than $90bn (£68.6bn) has dumped its stocks in some of the world’s biggest oil companies and miners responsible for lobbying against climate action.

Storebrand, a Norwegian asset manager, divested from miner Rio Tinto as well as US oil giants ExxonMobil and Chevron as part of a new climate policy targeting companies that use their political clout to block green policies.

The investor is one of many major financial institutions divesting from polluting industries, but is understood to be the first to dump shares in companies which use their influence to slow the pace of climate action.

Jan Erik Saugestad, the chief executive of Storebrand, said corporate lobbying activity designed to undermine solutions to “the greatest risks facing humanity” is “simply unacceptable”.

It's not OK to profit from the wreckage of the climate.

Storebrand will also divest from German chemicals company BASF and US electricity supplier Southern Company for lobbying against climate regulation, and a string of companies that derive more than 5% of their revenues from coal or oil sands.

“We need to accelerate away from oil and gas without deflecting attention on to carbon offsetting and carbon capture and storage. 

Renewable energy sources like solar and wind power are readily available alternatives,” he said.

“The Exxons and Chevrons of the world are holding us back,” he added. “This initial move does not mean that BP, Shell, Equinor and other oil and gas majors can rest easy and continue with business as usual, even though they are performing relatively better than US oil majors.”"

Go to The Guardian complete article

Related: How Hard Is It to Quit Coal? For Germany, 18 Years and $44 Billion (excerpt): NYT

Related: Prepare for even far more economic chaos than the depression caused by Covid-19


#jail the climate criminals, #jailclimatecriminals, #climatecriminals, Exxon, Chevron, BP, Shell, 

 

The big polluters’ masterstroke was to blame the climate crisis on you and me : The Guardian

Let’s stop calling this the Sixth Great Extinction. Let’s start calling it what it is: the “first great extermination”. A recent essay by the environmental historian Justin McBrien argues that describing the current eradication of living systems (including human societies) as an extinction event makes this catastrophe sound like a passive accident.

While we are all participants in the first great extermination, our responsibility is not evenly shared. The impacts of most of the world’s people are minimal. Even middle-class people in the rich world, whose effects are significant, are guided by a system of thought and action that is shaped in large part by corporations.

We are guided by an ideology so familiar and pervasive that we do not even recognise it as an ideology. It is called consumerism.

The Guardian’s polluters series reports that just 20 fossil fuel companies, some owned by states, some by shareholders, have produced 35% of the carbon dioxide and methane released by human activities since 1965. This was the year in which the president of the American Petroleum Institute told his members that the carbon dioxide they produced could cause “marked changes in climate” by the year 2000. They knew what they were doing.

Even as their own scientists warned that the continued extraction of fossil fuels could cause “catastrophic” consequences, the oil companies pumped billions of dollars into thwarting government action. They funded thinktanks and paid retired scientists and fake grassroots organisations to pour doubt and scorn on climate science. They sponsored politicians, particularly in the US Congress, to block international attempts to curtail greenhouse gas emissions. They invested heavily in greenwashing their public image.

These efforts continue today, with advertisements by Shell and Exxon that create the misleading impression that they’re switching from fossil fuels to renewable energy. In reality, Shell’s annual report reveals that it invested $25bn in oil and gas last year. But it provides no figure for its much-trumpeted investments in low-carbon technologies. Nor was the company able to do so when I challenged it.

Read The Guardian's George Monbiot article 

See also:

Climate change forcing millions out of homes: report: 9 NEWS

 

 

#criminales climáticos de la cárcel

#criminalesclimáticosdelacárcel

#jailclimatecriminals

#gaolclimatecriminals

As New York Takes Exxon to Court, Big Oil’s Strategy Against Climate Lawsuits Is Slowly Unveiled: DESMOG

 

Last week, in a historic first, the former CEO of a major oil company took the witness stand in a New York City courtroom and spent four hours defending his company against charges that it misled investors about the potential impact of global warming on its viability as a business.   

Rex Tillerson, who led ExxonMobil from 2006 until the end of 2016 when he became U.S. secretary of state, was grilled by an attorney for the New York State attorney general for allegedly participating in a “longstanding fraudulent scheme” by Exxon to fool investors. More specifically, the company is charged with exaggerating the stringency of its financial safeguards in pricing risks from regulations restricting greenhouse gas emissions, according to the complaint filed last year in New York state court.   

— By Dan Zegart (12 min. read) —

 

READ MORE

Just 20 Companies Are Responsible for 35% of All Greenhouse Gas Emissions: Medium

The Climate Accountability Institute recently released a new report into the role of the oil and gas industry in our climate crisis. The report looks at companies within this industry since 1965*, evaluating the fossil fuels which they are responsible for extracting from the earth and the emissions that these fossil fuels are responsible for.

The key finding of this report? That just twenty fossil fuel companies are responsible for 35% of the global total greenhouse gas emissions since 1965.

These companies are a mixture of investor-owned, private companies, and state-owned companies. Top of the list comes Saudi Aramco, a state-owned company in Saudi Arabia which is responsible for 4.38% of the global total emissions since 1965. In terms of private companies, Chevron, an American energy company active in 180 countries, is the worst offender, responsible for 3.2% of global total emissions since 1965. You probably recognise Exxon, BP, and Shell who are also up there in the list.

Credit: http://climateaccountability.org/pdf/CAI%20PressRelease%20Top20%20Oct19.pdf

 

Tabitha Whiting

Oct 30 · 4 min read

Read the Medium article

Related: 

Morrison’s claim of an Australian gold in per capita renewables is not true: RenewEconomy

 

Video: How the 1% will live After The End Of The World

 

#criminales climáticos de la cárcel

#criminalesclimáticosdelacárcel

#jailclimatecriminals

#gaolclimatecriminals

It’s Time to Try Fossil-Fuel Executives for Crimes Against Humanity: Jacobin

......"These are welcome attempts to hold the industry responsible for its role in warming our earth. It’s time, however, to take this series of legal proceedings to the next level: we should try fossil-fuel executives for crimes against humanity.

Guilty Beyond a Reasonable Doubt

Just one hundred fossil fuel producers — including privately held and state-owned companies — have been responsible for 71 percent of the greenhouse gas emissions released since 1988, emissions that have already killed at least tens of thousands of people through climate-fueled disasters worldwide.

Green New Deal advocates have been right to focus on the myriad ways that decarbonization can improve the lives of working-class Americans. But an important complement to that is holding those most responsible for the crisis fully accountable. It’s the right thing to do, and it makes clear to fossil-fuel executives that they could face consequences beyond vanishing profits."

Read the Jacobin story 

Related:

Great Barrier Reef outlook now 'very poor', Australian government review says: The Guardian

The ‘Historical Jigsaw of Climate Deception’: Private Notes Show How Big Oil Spread Climate Science Denial: DESMOG

EXXON & climate change

We’ve all heard the dodgy arguments: ‘the science is uncertain’, ‘climate change is natural, not down to humans’, ‘science has been hijacked by politics’… Now a new cache of documents sheds light on the origins of the disinformation.  

In another verse of a now familiar refrain, a fossil fuel industry group in the 1990s publicly promoted arguments to undermine confidence in climate science while internally acknowledging their products were driving up temperatures.  

• How Big Oil Tried to Capture the UN Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change
• Global Climate Coalition: Documents Reveal How Secretive Fossil Fuel Lobby Group Manipulated UN Climate Programs

A cache of meeting minutes, briefings, and emails uncovered by the Climate Investigations Center shows how industry group the Global Climate Coalition (GCC) used its financial clout and political connections to cast doubt on mainstream climate science until its disbandment in 2002. The GCC would for decades cast doubt on the veracity of climate science and strategically spread the message that the UN Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) was a politicised body, to discourage regulatory reform that would hit coalition members’ profits. 

Video: Busting Climate Change Myths \ Answers with Joe/ You Tube

Earth Day was this weekend, so I thought it would be a good opportunity to look at some of the most common myths promoted by climate change skeptics and see what the science has to say about it. Links to supporting material below.


 Follow me at all my places! Instagram: https://instagram.com/answerswithjoe Snapchat: https://www.snapchat.com/add/answersw... Facebook: http://www.facebook.com/answerswithjoe Twitter: https://www.twitter.com/answerswithjoe

LINKS LINKS LINKS: More about the Robbers

Cave Experiment: https://www.theguardian.com/science/2...

More about the fossil fuel industry and tobacco companies using the same tactics:

https://www.scientificamerican.com/ar... Peter Doran's Climate Science Survey: https://agupubs.onlinelibrary.wiley.c... Climate change consensus same as smoking and cancer: https://www.scientificamerican.com/ar... Why CO2 alone won't help plants grow: https://www.smithsonianmag.com/smart-... Lori Fenton's paper on Mars warming: https://www.nature.com/articles/natur...

On the single cause fallacy that climate change in the past is the reason why it's changing now: https://www.skepticalscience.com/clim...

Sulphur Dioxide trends in relation to volcanic activity: https://www.epa.gov/air-trends/sulfur...
An article about Debbie Dooley: https://www.nytimes.com/2018/02/28/bu...
Military Times article about pentagon planning for climate change: https://www.militarytimes.com/news/yo...
Exxon Mobil new CEO embracing the carbon tax: https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articl...
Study on Exxon Mobil scientists and internal communications: https://insideclimatenews.org/news/22...

#climate action  #climate science  #climate deniers   #climate sceptics  #climate catastrophe

Roger Hollander Blog 2016 Allegation: 'Criminal Exxon: Climate Change Denial'

Roger’s note: Marx said that capitalism isn’t viable because it is unable to sustain a livable society.  Nothing is more true today.  The political leaders of the nations of the world got together in Paris and outlined a plan to halt climate change.  It was not the most ambitious plan, but even that plan has zero chance of implementation.  BIG OIL simply won’t allow it.  Whether it be dictators or democratically elected leaders, they are powerless to save the planet because they do not call the shots.





Exxon and other oil companies pay the same PR firms and right wing front groups that helped tobacco companies lie about the risks of smoking.

Pulitzer Prize-nominated reporting shows that Exxon has known that burning oil and gas causes catastrophic climate change as far back as 1977.

But by the 1990s, Exxon had instead started funding climate disinformation at a massive scale.






All designed to spread confusion about the urgency of climate change and keep their profits high.




Three states (and counting) are investigating Exxon for misleading shareholders about the risks of climate change.
So now Exxon acknowledges human-caused climate change and even claims to support a carbon tax.”






But in reality, Exxon is quietly blocking progress. The company remains a major funder of denial-promoting groups, including the American Legislative Exchange Council (ALEC).

 
ALEC opposes a carbon tax and misinforms state lawmakers about climate change. But without Exxon’s funding, ALEC would lose influence fast.





Producing carbon emissions is dangerous. But Exxon is producing something else just as dangerous: climate change denial.

Denial is slowing our transition to cleaner energy and harming vulnerable communities.

Exxon continues to spend $27 million a year to spread denial and block climate action.

All eyes will be on Exxon at its annual shareholder meeting in Dallas on May 25, so we need to act fast.

Tell Exxon to come clean and leave the denial-promoting American Legislative Exchange Council (ALEC).


Reblogged from

roger hollander

News and Opinion

Criminal Exxon: Climate Change Denial May 24, 2016

Posted by rogerhollander in Energy, Environment, Uncategorized.
Tags: alec, carbon tax, climate change, climate science, environment, exxon, fossil fuel, pollution
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