“Just 90 companies caused two-thirds of man-made global warming emissions”
Article Here
Suzanne Goldenberg’s article for the Guardian manages to perfectly encapsulate why I held the opinion that I had upon starting this blog. In short, the article explains how and why only 90 companies have managed to account for the vast majority of greenhouse gasses in the past 25 years. With the world exceeding 7.5 billion in population, it’s hard not to draw connections between this knowledge and the common practice of shaming individuals for their contribution to climate change. Though not peer reviewed – unlike the vast majority of the works to be discussed within this blog – this article is credible and factual and raises the question: should businesses be put under the microscope for their practices, or is this an inevitability in a capitalist society?
It’s difficult to not be critical of these massive companies, especially when the study within the article proves them to be majorly at fault for climate change. These companies have always been the problem “since the dawning of the industrial age” (Goldenberg). Even more, the number people responsible for the greenhouse emissions is so small that, according to climate researcher Richard Heede, “they could all fit on a Greyhound bus or two” (Goldenberg). That means that an absurdly small population of people is responsible for the vast majority of climate change so, in comparison, it seems a little misguided to shame ordinary people for daring to commute to work without carpooling, or not having the money to fix a leaky faucet. This article, most notably, only says that 90 companies are to blame for 2/3 of greenhouse gases; this means that the other 1/3 is shared with every other company and human being in the world. This means that around 7.5 billion people create only a portion of a third of the greenhouse gasses in the world; and divide whatever that is by 7.5 billion and each person is contributing less than 0.0000000044% to greenhouse gasses.
I cannot, no matter what anything else says, ignore this fact: a single human being, living perfectly green or completely environmentally unfriendly, will make an absolutely undetectable difference in the change of the climate. Though, even if every human managed to obtain the privilege to live a completely green life, it’s still difficult to ignore the fact that climate change is fueled almost entirely by capitalism and exploitation of the environment by massive companies.
This article serves as the framework for my mindset going into this project, it provides the statistics and allows me a pretty clear perspective on why and how climate change is happening, who’s to blame, and leaves one question open for interpretation: what can be done?
