¶ CDP Carbon Majors Report 2017

Url

pdf

¶ BibTeX

@article{griffin2017carbon,
  title={The carbon majors database},
  author={Griffin, Paul and Heede, CR},
  journal={CDP carbon majors report 2017},
  volume={14},
  year={2017}
}

¶ My Summary

The majority of anthropogenic greenhouse-gas emissions (roughly 70%) come from the burning of fossil fuels. This report looks at the supply-side of those emissions by tabulating the amount of fossil fuels produced by a number of large firms/organizations.

For each firm in their sample, they add up the firm’s direct operational emissions¹ and the emissions caused by the downstream combustion of fuels they sell. For the latter, they estimate these numbers simply by taking the unit sales of each firm and multiplying it by coefficients representing the emissions per unit (eg tonnes of CO2 per barrel of oil).

The end result is a table ranking fossil-fuel extractors by the amount of emissions caused, directly or indirectly, by their extraction activities. (This is almost the same as ranking firms by the amount of fossil fuels extracted, just with a few sensible adjustments and weights.)

¶ Top 20 firms by Cumulative Emissions 1988-2015

Units below, except for the last column, are in millions of tons of CO2 equivalent.

¶ Top 20 firms by 2015 Emissions

Units below, except for the last column, are in millions of tons of CO2 equivalent.

¶ My Complaint about Internet Discourse

This report is an interesting and worthwhile document, but it’s also the source of one of the most annoyingly idiotic arguments on the internet.

The internet discourse typically goes like this: Someone mentions the need to cut back on carbon emissions, and maybe brings up the fact that individual consumers can contribute by traveling less and reducing meat consumption. Then someone chimes in saying “Well, actually, just 100 companies are responsible for 70 percent of greenhouse gas emissions.” They imply or outright state that there’s no need to change our lifestyles to mitigate climate change; that we just need to force the evil capitalists to stop polluting for fun.

This kind of argument is especially frustrating because people link this report to back up their assertions, despite never even having read the thing. And I know none of them have read it, because even if they missed the part which says that 90% of the tabulated emissions come from downstream energy consumption, the fact that the number one company on the list is “China” should have clued them in to the fact they’re misinterpreting the headline.

This is a silly emotional response on my part, but it makes me anxious about humanity’s collective ability to seek truth. A few years ago, it felt to me like climate-change denial was culturally waning. And then a brand new species of denialism appeared to fill the ecological niche left empty.²