Maybe they aren’t forcing us to buy shit directly, but a lot of the things they sell, particularly oil and gas are things we depend on because that’s how society is built.
A lot of these completely blameless companies you are defending hire lobbyists to make it harder for individuals who are trying hard to make a difference to have any real effect on government policy. This ensures said companies can keep operating in the way they currently are to maximise profits.
Yes, we could all be doing more, but it’s hard when huge multinational corporations are not only not working together with us to help, but spending billions of dollars to oppose legislation that could help because it would hurt their bottom line.
Okay great, if I live anywhere besides NYC, where’s my damn train for transport? Oh right its nonexistent. I’d love to take a train but the people that run this shithole say its too expensive and continue to pave more roads! Wow I love living here where my government continues to listen to big oil and destroy the planet in the process!!
There is less kerosene burned in all aviation in the world than is used in lamps and cookstoves in Africa and Asia. Aviation is really not the driver of climate change. Of all transport emissions aviation is 8% (in the US). 80% is cars and trucks.
Moreover, the aviation industry has a profit motive to reduce emissions because ever gallon of jet fuel saved is money saved.
The same applies to shipping (11% of global emissions), modern container ships are so fucking massive and slower than some wooden sailing ships from the 19th century because efficiency is the only real way they can make more money.
Fuel burned near the stratosphere contributes several times more towards global warming than regular stoves. We don’t need 70% of all flights while africa needs fuel to survive.
Strange how people can be so oblivious as to the role they play in the consumption of energy and materials…
I’ve recently started to believe that the only way climate change is going to end is if a very, very large percentage of the human population dies off very quickly… like… 70-80% or more. One billion people still seems like too many.
That statistic is flawed it counts downstream combustion of coal oil and gas for energy purposes (this is 90% of the total company emissions in the metric) which means you can buy a fossil fuel car fill it with petrol and burn it and that will be counted as corporate emissions
yeah its in like page 1 or 2 of the primary source the stat comes from one sec ill get it
Direct operational emissions (Scope 16 ) and emissions from the use of sold products (Scope 3: Category 11) are attributed to the extraction and production of oil, gas, and coal. Scope 1 emissions arise from the self-consumption of fuel, flaring, and venting or fugitive releases of methane. Scope 3 emissions account for 90% of total company emissions and result from the downstream combustion of coal, oil, and gas for energy purposes. A small fraction of fossil fuel production is used in non-energy applications which sequester carbon.
Or is that the difference between the Scope 1+3 tables and the All cause table in this page?
edit: Snopes has in fact written a fact check that corroborates the methodology used by CDP is potentially flawed for this exact reason. So it will not be accurate - www.snopes.com/…/corporations-greenhouse-gas/.
I’ll defer to the following point by the original Twitter OP though, which I still think is valid: “The point I was trying to make is that any media coverage that reduces the issue to personal choices is incomplete, and [structural] issues should always be central to climate reporting,” Johnson told us. “Individuals’ choices are not unimportant. They just shouldn’t be the focus of climate coverage.”
tl;dr: Yes, personal responsibility and reducing one’s carbon footprint is also very important, but there is chronic under-reporting on the other end of the equation.
The question is: should we stop reporting on how personal responsibility plays a part just because people think it’s unfair? Isn’t that straight out whataboutism?
still better than the opposite, where you’re just trying to buy food but everything comes in some shitty packaging made of hydrocarbons and it will be counted as your individual contribution to the waste problem. regulation works (that’s why they oppose it so hard) and it works a lot better than “voting with your wallet” which is what we would be supposed to do if it was up to us – where certain people have a hell of a lot more votes than we do
The statement is flawed because it takes the personal responsibility out of those corporate profits. Oil production burns a lot of fuel but it’s profitable because I keep buying it. Cargo ships make a lot of emissions but it’s profitable because I keep buying foreign goods. Cow farms produce tons of methane but they’re so huge because I keep eating beef.
Corporations do not exist without the customer. Massive buyout conglomerations greatly misrepresent true pollution per industry production units. If I said ExxonMobil is the dirtiest company in the world, does that mean they’re polluting worse than BP? No, not by itself. You have to look at tons of oil produced between the two and figure out a pollution per ton figure. Would it make sense to say Amazon is a very clean business because part of their business uses unconditioned warehouses? Not really, you’d probably want to separate out their trucking and delivery divisions from their storage and then compare it to UPS and FedEx via gallons per ton delivered. I’ve even seen people argue their single-item order from Amazon isn’t wasteful because “the truck is coming by anyway”. No! The truck is not an autonomous sushi conveyor belt swinging by. It’s a business asset being routed to customers.
I’m not saying these corporations are good or clean. I’m not saying they don’t cheat, lie, hide, and bribe governments to ignore their hazards. I’m just saying you can’t take a 100% hands off view of the issue, either. I drive a cleaner car and drive less so Exxon makes less. I wait for my ordering needs to build up a little to improve efficiency of the delivery. I buy more local and national so I don’t demand a cargo ship to carry my trinkets. Obviously it’s not perfect and I have a very, very minor impact, but that’s the whole point of being in a society. A community works together for the common good.
IIRC the study that the “X% of companies are responsible for X% emissions” is somewhat misleading. For example they use the combined output of everyone’s car exhaust and attribute that to the major oil companies since they provide the gas. Not saying that large corporations and the wealthy in general contributing to climate change exponentially more than the average person, but its misleading to say that as an individual it doesn’t matter if we try to use less energy.
This exactly! We need to go after the corporations with policy changes but that doesn’t mean that we, as individuals, are completely blameless or that individually actions are inconsequential. If nobody chooses to drive less or to take the bus then collectively we’re telling the major oil companies to continue with business as usual at if nothing’s wrong. The corporations are to blame but we’re all active participants!
For a big majority of people, there isn’t simply a lot of options, or any options at all, to take the car less, or buy less over packaged items, or reduce the pollution footprint.
The corporations won’t offer any alternative unless legislations make these alternatives the right choice business wise.
So toothless legislation is a problem and the governing bodies absolutely have the lion share of responsibilities and the personal efforts are worthless without the support of the governing bodies.
Well I myself have a problem with this blaming game going on. Big corporations say they do their best and try to make people feel guilty about their lifestyle choices. People say they have no alternative and that anyway it’s mostly big corporations who are responsible. Politics say whatever they need to get elected. As long as everyone keeps doing what they do, blaming someone else and finding excuses for not changing how they run their household, corporation ou party, nothing will change. Everyone is responsible. How much I am responsible compared to you, or compared to ExxonMobil’s CEO, is becoming more and more irrelevant.
On the topic of what we do though, campaigning for actually effective legislation 1) actually works, and 2) has a far greater effect than trying to micro-optimize our individual lives. Optimization problems are solved by gathering data and focusing on the largest contributor, not just picking shit randomly.
Also, make no mistake, enacting a carbon tax, for example, would make all of our lives harder, we simply wouldn’t be able to afford as much stuff as we do now. But it would align the market forces to find efficient, low-carbon solutions, as opposed to find efficient solutions despite carbon emissions. Trickle-down economics is bullshit when it comes to rewards, but no company (that stays in business) ever shied away from passing along operating costs. (A similar thing happened to nutrient labeling, the food industry fought tooth and nail against it because it would be a downturn in the business, but it was ratified anyway and since then options across the board got a lot healthier, because there was simply an incentive for the corpos to fix their shit to some degree where there previously wasn’t. And that was just about informing consumers, not fully ) So don’t make this out as if we’re just pointing the blame so you can sit back and let the big companies do all the work, because that’s not what this is about, it’s simply about the fact that capitalism doesn’t run on morals (as it is so clearly apparent in its results) so we need a little more than that to force the corpos to work along with the rest of us. Because if they don’t, all our efforts will be in vain.
The point is, regulation would actually work. We tried to make climate change the individual’s responsibility for decades and we’re still barreling straight towards the climate apocalypse, so it’s time to add some other measures too, not just try to slightly increase individual contributions and see if that solves it. Spoiler: it won’t, but it’s comfy to some high-ranking execs if we waste valuable quarters trying that again and again and again. And I guess it gives us a comfy delusion of control too.
And my favorite tidbit not included here is how much pollution the US military causes. We know it’s off the charts BUT they’re allowed to operate with zero oversight and accountability regarding the bugfuck amount of pollution and wrecked ecosystems that military exercises have caused. We don’t even know for sure how bad they are but you just look at how much fuel an single idling M1 tank uses and it’s insane
A tank will need approximately 300 gallons every eight hours; this will vary depending on mission, terrain, and weather. A single tank takes 10 minutes to refuel. Refueling and rearming of a tank platoon–four tanks–is approximately 30 minutes under ideal conditions. 0.6 miles per gallon.
It’s pretty accepted that the US military is the worst polluter on earth, but this never gets brought up
And on the other side of the coin military training areas in Germany are studied as potential nature reserves because just some limited amount of sane oversight goes a long way…
Yeah, I think I read something about how the DMZ in Korea is flourishing with wildlife because the animals there aren’t heavy enough to trip the mine that both sides have laid. Thus no people are encroaching on them and they can just let themselves happen.
The US spends millions of dollars buying up land around military facilities and permanently conserving it. There are Federal grant programs that work in partnership with nonprofit land trusts to accomplish the very thing. Every conserved property has a conservation values inventory completed as part of the protection process that documents natural communities (including rare and endangered species). This inventory serves as the baseline for enforcement of the conservation restrictions. I’m a reformed real estate attorney that works for a conservation land trust.
I look up train routes (and sometimes bus)everytime I’m going more than 80 miles or so. Guess how many times I’ve found one that will get me where I’m going? I’ll give you a hint, it’s zero.
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