Who got us into this mess? Part 5 - big corporations
The last few days we’ve been cutting the data on global greenhouse gas emissions in different ways to understand how much an individual country has contributed to global warming. The blame doesn’t all lie with countries though - multinational corporations, and in particular those in the oil and gas industry, also bear responsibility for the climate crisis. So which ones are the most culpable?
A couple of organisations have looked into company-level data so we can have a go at answering this question. It is important to note that the greenhouse gas emissions of these corporations isn’t separate to country emissions, they would also be captured in the reporting of the country the emissions were produced in.
A 2017 report by CDN, who run a global disclosure system, titled the ‘Carbon Majors Report’ found that since 1988 just 25 companies have been responsible for half of the world’s industrial greenhouse gas emissions. The top 100 companies have been responsible for 71%. That report also made the shocking discovery that more greenhouse gas emissions have been released by the fossil fuel industry since 1988 than between the beginning of the Industrial Revolution and that year. 1988 was also the year the International Panel on Climate Change was established.
In 2019 The Guardian reported analysis by the Climate Accountability Institute that found 20 fossil fuel companies had been responsible for 480 Gt of CO2e since 1965, or 35% of all energy-related carbon dioxide and methane worldwide. 1965 was chosen as the start date for the analysis because it was the same year that the president of the American Petroleum Institute told its annual gathering:
“One of the most important predictions of the [report authored by the Environmental Pollution Panel of the President’s Science Advisory Committee] is that carbon dioxide is being added to the Earth’s atmosphere by the burning of coal, oil and natural gas at such a rate by the year 2000 the heat balance will be so modified as possibly to cause marked changes in climate beyond local or even national efforts.”
Twelve of the companies listed above are state-owned, while eight are investor-owned. The silver lining is that those companies can be subjected to pressure from lenders, investors and shareholders.