- Only 57 fossil fuels and cement producers have been responsible for most of the world’s CO2 emissions since 2016, according to the Carbon Majors report by InfluenceMap
- Saudi Aramco, Gazprom, and Coal India were the top three CO2-emitting companies during this period.
- InfluenceMap’s database aims to increase transparency around climate change contributors for legal, academic, campaign, and investor purposes.
This just in: few companies supply energy to our planet.
This shouldn’t surprise anyone. These are massive conglomerates that will keep pumping as long as the demand exists
These are massive conglomerates that will keep demand high by attacking alternative energy sources, funding climate denial, and engaging in sanctioned corruption.
Yeah - those headlines do more harm than good as people will just point fingers and think it’s enough to shut those companies down in order to fix climate change…
As long as there’s demand other companies will step in and then instead of those few you have 10-20 supplying the same amount of oil with nothing gained
Tax them!
In theory, making the commodity more expensive changes some decisions about how much to use
In theory, the vice tax goes toward mitigating the effects of the vice, or preventive efforts.
So, no. The tax isn’t enough to change behavior nor is the money raised enough to help prevent or mitigate, even if it were targeted to those efforts
The tax isn’t even nearly enough to cover road maintenance, although a little more should help
I might argue that demand for gasoline is relatively inelastic. You can adjust the price quite a bit before people change their consumption habits, simply because transit options are inflexible and relatively small portions of one’s overall budget.
A better alternative might be to invest in mass transit infrastructure - rail, bus, and bike/pedestrian options - that undercut the existing private car market. In cities like Tokyo, London, Moscow, Amsterdam, Shanghai, and NYC, where rail/bus/pedestrian options are abundant and commercial real estate isn’t obligated to accommodate one car per visitor, you have much lower energy consumed per capita and much smaller amounts of waste generated when moving people and material equivalent distance.
We incentivize consumption based on our most cheap and abundant available mode of transit. I might argue that raising gas taxes and funneling that towards new road construction would have the opposite intended effect if your goal was reducing emissions.
It IS taxed. Virtually every state has a gas tax. California has one of the highest gas taxes in the nation, at $.51/gal.
Taxes in theory reduce consumption because the price increases, like the 25% tax on Chinese EVs levied by the U.S. to protect… the fossil fuel industry.
the 25% tax on Chinese EVs levied by the U.S. to protect… the
fossil fuel industrydomestic EV market
If you want to talk about US fossil fuel protectionism, check out the patient on the nickel metal battery - first used in GE’s EV1 to great success - which was purchased and squatted on by Texaco/Chevron for over twenty years.
Modern regulation is far more about insourcing the production of Lithium Ion batteries (a highly lucrative market for auto manufacturers because of the crazy market ups) than shielding the fossil fuel industries from a technology that’s been widespread globally for over a decade.
No no it’s regular people not putting plastic take-out containers in the recycling bin doing it!
It’s everyone. We’re all responsible. These companies only produce this much because we’re buying the shit. You’re doing exactly what you claim theyre doing: blaming others so you don’t have to take any responsibility for yourself.
No, they are highly subsidized, have a cartel, and have access to legislators (if you think U.S. lobbying is bad, Gazprom is owned by an oligarch and Aramco is literally the royal family’s business). The success of their business model (or failure if you look at it in reality) hinges on supression of information, supression of competition, price fixing, violence etc.
These companies only produce this much because that is what they need to do to get the profit they expect, and last year they decided to produce a little less because they wanted a little more profit. It has nothing to do with consumer choice because consumers for the most part don’t have a choice.
Buy 2nd hand, go without, repair, repurpose, grow some food if you can.
It has nothing to do with consumer choice because consumers for the most part don’t have a choice.
I live in a very walkable area among relatively wealthy people. The reason we picked here was partially, but significantly, because we could walk into our little downtown so we didn’t have to drive everywhere. I still regularly see people in the downtown who have driven there from right next door. Hell, even sometimes I’ve been lazy and done it myself.
We also have access to a little store that doesn’t use plastic and focuses on decreasing environmental footprint and landfill usage. I’ve actually had neighbors make fun of me for going there. I didn’t even realize how little I needed a lot of the consumer conveniences I was using until I switched to primarily this store. I was making a consumer choice (well, mainly, my wife, I would have been more conscious about it. Luckily she is now fully on board, maybe even more so than me) that I thought made sense. . .but it really didn’t. It was unnecessarily wasteful for almost zero gain. Razors, dishsoap, laundry detergent, shampoo, handsoap. . .we just refill all of these things now.
I tend to bike to work (I know, I’m lucky because it’s only about a 3 mile bike for me and relatively safe). The parking lot of my office has plenty of high end SUVs and even large pickup trucks. It’s safe to say that the people who actually regularly need a vehicle like this is near zero. The consumer is making the choice to buy these huge vehicles.
And let’s talk about meat. Hell, it’s 2024 and I still hear people talk about how mainly it is to eat meat and brag about how they eat it every night. We could be better, but we’ve certainly move towards a more plant-based diet.
I get that the consumer is not the only thing, and corporations need to change too. But this idea that the consumer is somehow innocent in all of this doesn’t reflect the reality that I clearly see around me. People are constantly making just bad choices that are pissing on the environment. . .and this constant “don’t blame the consumer!” I see being pushed is just, as I said in another post, an attempt to deal with the cognitive dissonances of pretending to care about this while at the same time doing jack shit to limit your own personal impact.
They also knew about climate change in the 1970s and deliberately hid that information and spent massive amounts of money to attack anyone who tried to blow the whistle.
