Do You Know Why Those 100 Companies are Responsible for 70% of emissions?

I wrote this a long time ago and it’s time to publish it for you. Enjoy!

One statistic that gets thrown around is the fact that 100 companies are responsible or 70% of carbon emissions. That comes from the Climate Accountability Institute’s Climate Majors Report who have tracked the emissions of some of the largest emitters and you know what they have in common? Almost all of them are fossil fuel companies, most of who are state owned.

Now, I’m not going to go on a tirade about how climate change is literally your fucking fault, nor am I going to ignore how companies and their business practices leads to this, rather I’ll leave on this, an attempt at addressing climate change will inevitably affect you in some way.

It’ll result in you driving less, or maybe having to put on a raincoat to walk somewhere. You might not get all the products you want, you might hang onto stuff longer, things may be more expensive and so on. Expecting absolutely nothing about your life to change in response to climate change is ridiculous.

So while this statistics points to the main culprit (fossil fuels), we need to look further and re-examine how society is structures.

There’s another trend where we point to billionaires as having an outsized footprint, which is true. The worst billionaire would be 8000 tons whereas America is at 15 tons, and the world at 5. Given there are 3000 of them, that comes out to about 1.6—4.8 million people, and there are 8 billion of us.

I guess you could argue that them living lavish lives comes off as aspirational.

Fossil fuel companies aren’t entirely off the hook. They’ve done plenty to undermine climate action. It’s just that the problem is a lot harder to address than just a few bad people. Though a source based carbon tax might not be so bad. It’ll be easier to collect and it has the optics of “taxing fossil fuel companies”.