100 Companies, 71%
Today I will be writing in response to a blog post from one of my fellow classmates Ramy Khadra. Ramy is a sophomore at the University at Buffalo and is also a big clean energy activist like myself. He has written some fantastic pieces on the subject so I strongly urge you to check out his work.
The article he chose to write about details how most of the global carbon emissions come from corporations, not from individuals. Specifically from the article, he quotes, “Individual energy consumption was never more than 25% of gross domestic energy consumption, from 1994 to 2009.” (Breeze, 2018) Using this data, Ramy concludes that the other 75% must come from large corporations, most of which operate here in the United States. This is a shocking revelation.
To take it a step even further, the number of companies that make up this large percentage may be far smaller than you think. According to the Business and Human Rights Resource Centre, about 100 companies account for 71% of the world’s total carbon emissions. Some of the companies that comprise this number are unsurprisingly oil corporations such as ExxonMobil, BP, Shell, and Chevron. These few companies I have just listed have also been identified as the highest emitting investor owned companies since 1988. If these companies continue to operate the way they do, it could have devastating consequences on the planet, even more devastating than the damage they have already caused.
Billionaire and Tesla CEO Elon Musk came up with a pretty creative way to combat this toxic trend. He proposed a carbon tax which would charge companies on the amount of carbon dioxide that they emit with the goal being that they would hopefully change their production methods. Unfortunately however, this idea was quickly dismissed by our current administration as being too difficult to implement.
Ramy made a statement that I believe is very important when it comes to this topic. He said, “That’s not to say we shouldn’t all do our part to take strides towards helping our environment. We shouldn’t take away from all of the individual efforts everyone has made over the years for a cleaner environment.” Ramy is absolutely correct here. The statistics may seem daunting, and it is certainly very disheartening to hear all this. Some of us may even feel powerless to do anything but we cannot give up. We must continue to hold our government and these corporations accountable, even when they shoot us down. If we engage in environmentally friendly practices despite what the market presents to us, this will eventually affect their bottom dollar and they will be forced to listen.
Khadra, R.(2021, March 10). A Different Perspective. https://medium.com/a-cleaner-future/a-different-perspective-5dbcc9f13849
