By Paul Homewood
As usual the Guardian puts the cart in front of the horse!
A mere 57 oil, gas, coal and cement producers are directly linked to 80% of the world’s greenhouse gas emissions since the 2016 Paris climate agreement, a study has shown.
This powerful cohort of state-controlled corporations and shareholder-owned multinationals are the leading drivers of the climate crisis, according to the Carbon Majors Database, which is compiled by world-renowned researchers.
Although governments pledged in Paris to cut greenhouse gases, the analysis reveals that most mega-producers increased their output of fossil fuels and related emissions in the seven years after that climate agreement, compared with the seven years before.
In the database of 122 of the world’s biggest historical climate polluters, the researchers found that 65% of state entities and 55% of private-sector companies had scaled up production.
During this period, the biggest investor-owned contributor to emissions was ExxonMobil of the United States, which was linked to 3.6 gigatonnes of CO2 over seven years, or 1.4% of the global total. Close behind were Shell, BP, Chevron and TotalEnergies, each of which was associated with at least 1% of global emissions.
The most striking trend, however, was the surging growth of emissions related to state and state-owned producers, particularly in the Asian coal sector.
Do they really not understand that these fossil fuel companies don’t emit anything. It is everybody else who burns the fuel that is responsible for emissions.
So simply shutting down oilfields is not the issue, as the Guardian implies.
It’s what the world is supposed to when that happens.