90 Corporations Responsible For 66% of CO2 Emissions

90 Corporations Responsible For 66% of CO2 Emissions

By Suzanne Goldenberg / The Guardian

The climate crisis of the 21st century has been caused largely by just 90 companies, which between them produced nearly two-thirds of the greenhouse gas emissions generated since the dawning of the industrial age, new research suggests.

The companies range from investor-owned firms – household names such as Chevron, Exxon and BP – to state-owned and government-run firms.

The analysis, which was welcomed by the former vice-president Al Gore as a “crucial step forward” found that the vast majority of the firms were in the business of producing oil, gas or coal, found the analysis, which has been published in the journal Climatic Change.

“There are thousands of oil, gas and coal producers in the world,” climate researcher and author Richard Heede at the Climate Accountability Institute in Colorado said. “But the decision makers, the CEOs, or the ministers of coal and oil if you narrow it down to just one person, they could all fit on a Greyhound bus or two.”

Half of the estimated emissions were produced just in the past 25 years – well past the date when governments and corporations became aware that rising greenhouse gas emissions from the burning of coal and oil were causing dangerous climate change.

Many of the same companies are also sitting on substantial reserves of fossil fuel which – if they are burned – puts the world at even greater risk of dangerous climate change.

Climate change experts said the data set was the most ambitious effort so far to hold individual carbon producers, rather than governments, to account.

The United Nations climate change panel, the IPCC, warned in September that at current rates the world stood within 30 years of exhausting its “carbon budget” – the amount of carbon dioxide it could emit without going into the danger zone above 2C warming. The former US vice-president and environmental champion, Al Gore, said the new carbon accounting could re-set the debate about allocating blame for the climate crisis.

Leaders meeting in Warsaw for the UN climate talks this week clashed repeatedly over which countries bore the burden for solving the climate crisis – historic emitters such as America or Europe or the rising economies of India and China.

Gore in his comments said the analysis underlined that it should not fall to governments alone to act on climate change.

“This study is a crucial step forward in our understanding of the evolution of the climate crisis. The public and private sectors alike must do what is necessary to stop global warming,” Gore told the Guardian. “Those who are historically responsible for polluting our atmosphere have a clear obligation to be part of the solution.”

Between them, the 90 companies on the list of top emitters produced 63% of the cumulative global emissions of industrial carbon dioxide and methane between 1751 to 2010, amounting to about 914 gigatonne CO2 emissions, according to the research. All but seven of the 90 were energy companies producing oil, gas and coal. The remaining seven were cement manufacturers.

The list of 90 companies included 50 investor-owned firms – mainly oil companies with widely recognised names such as Chevron, Exxon, BP , and Royal Dutch Shell and coal producers such as British Coal Corp, Peabody Energy and BHP Billiton.

Some 31 of the companies that made the list were state-owned companies such as Saudi Arabia’s Saudi Aramco, Russia’s Gazprom and Norway’s Statoil.

Nine were government run industries, producing mainly coal in countries such as China, the former Soviet Union, North Korea and Poland, the host of this week’s talks.

Experts familiar with Heede’s research and the politics of climate change said they hoped the analysis could help break the deadlock in international climate talks.

“It seemed like maybe this could break the logjam,” said Naomi Oreskes, professor of the history of science at Harvard. “There are all kinds of countries that have produced a tremendous amount of historical emissions that we do not normally talk about. We do not normally talk about Mexico or Poland or Venezuela. So then it’s not just rich v poor, it is also producers v consumers, and resource rich v resource poor.”

Michael Mann, the climate scientist, said he hoped the list would bring greater scrutiny to oil and coal companies’ deployment of their remaining reserves. “What I think could be a game changer here is the potential for clearly fingerprinting the sources of those future emissions,” he said. “It increases the accountability for fossil fuel burning. You can’t burn fossil fuels without the rest of the world knowing about it.”

Others were less optimistic that a more comprehensive accounting of the sources of greenhouse gas emissions would make it easier to achieve the emissions reductions needed to avoid catastrophic climate change.

John Ashton, who served as UK’s chief climate change negotiator for six years, suggested that the findings reaffirmed the central role of fossil fuel producing entities in the economy.

“The challenge we face is to move in the space of not much more than a generation from a carbon-intensive energy system to a carbonneutral energy system. If we don’t do that we stand no chance of keeping climate change within the 2C threshold,” Ashton said.

“By highlighting the way in which a relatively small number of large companies are at the heart of the current carbon-intensive growth model, this report highlights that fundamental challenge.”

Meanwhile, Oreskes, who has written extensively about corporate-funded climate denial, noted that several of the top companies on the list had funded the climate denial movement.

“For me one of the most interesting things to think about was the overlap of large scale producers and the funding of disinformation campaigns, and how that has delayed action,” she said.

The data represents eight years of exhaustive research into carbon emissions over time, as well as the ownership history of the major emitters.

The companies’ operations spanned the globe, with company headquarters in 43 different countries. “These entities extract resources from every oil, natural gas and coal province in the world, and process the fuels into marketable products that are sold to consumers on every nation on Earth,” Heede writes in the paper.

The largest of the investor-owned companies were responsible for an outsized share of emissions. Nearly 30% of emissions were produced just by the top 20 companies, the research found.

By Heede’s calculation, government-run oil and coal companies in the former Soviet Union produced more greenhouse gas emissions than any other entity – just under 8.9% of the total produced over time. China came a close second with its government-run entities accounting for 8.6% of total global emissions.

ChevronTexaco was the leading emitter among investor-owned companies, causing 3.5% of greenhouse gas emissions to date, with Exxon not far behind at 3.2%. In third place, BP caused 2.5% of global emissions to date.

The historic emissions record was constructed using public records and data from the US department of energy’s Carbon Dioxide Information and Analysis Centre, and took account of emissions all along the supply chain.

The centre put global industrial emissions since 1751 at 1,450 gigatonnes.

From The Guardian

Photo by Gene Gallin on Unsplash

Global war against indigenous intensifying as imperialists scramble for land and resources

By Ron Corben / DW

A new report on minorities and indigenous people warns that the global ‘intensification’ in the exploitation of natural resources is leading to mounting conflicts for the world’s 370 million indigenous people.

The report for 2012 by the London-based human rights group, Minority Rights Group International (MRG), says indigenous peoples “in every region of the world” face the risk of being “driven from their land and natural resources.”

The land and resources are all “vital for their livelihoods, their culture and often their identity as a people,” Vital Bambanze, chair of the UN Expert Mechanism on the Rights of Indigenous Peoples, said in the report.

From the Batwa of the Great Lakes region in Central Africa, and the Endorois and Ogiek in Kenya, to hill tribes in northern Thailand, Bedouin in the Middle East and Uighurs in China’s Xinjiang province – all “struggle to maintain their cultural integrity against their respective governments’ desire to put national development first,” Bambanze said.

Unprecedented demand for resources in Asia

The report says the unprecedented demand for natural resources across Asia is “feeding ethnic conflict and displacement and is a severe threat to the lands, livelihoods and the way of life of minorities and indigenous people.”

Carl Soderbergh, an MRG spokesperson, warns the situation faced by indigenous groups is deteriorating world-wide.

“In terms of the trends globally what has been happening over the last decade is that there’s been an intensification of the exploitation of natural resources pushing into areas populated by minorities and indigenous peoples,” Soderbergh told DW.

In regions such as Latin America, the issues faced by communities centered on mining and logging, in North America on tar-sands mining, there were conflicts over wind farms and iron ore mining in the Arctic, while in Africa, indigenous communities faced the leasing of thousands of hectares of land for corporations or foreign governments.

“All governments are chasing a dominant development paradigm in which today minorities and indigenous peoples don’t really have a place and that is a problem,” he said.

In China, investment in mining has forced herders off traditional grazing lands and ancestral villages in regions such as Xinjiang Uighur Autonomous Region, as well as in Tibet.

In Vietnam, over 90,000 people, mostly ethnic Thai, were relocated to make way for the Son La hydropower plant with Vietnamese scientists saying many were left without access to agricultural land.

Meanwhile, in Cambodia’s Prey Lang Forest region, home to the Kuy indigenous people, official land grants of tens of thousands of hectares of forest for mineral extraction, timber and rubber plantations have forced many people to give up their traditional livelihoods.

Conflict has also been evident in Indonesia in areas of increased palm oil plantation development and the mining industry in Papua.

Investment from China seen as a driver for economic growth

Nicole Girard, the rights group’s Asia Program Director, says levels of conflict over land is increasing in South East Asia, driven by foreign investment, including from China.

“It’s definitely increasing, the resource exploitation in indigenous people’s territories; in Southeast Asia, the economies of Laos and Vietnam are opening to more foreign investment, including lots of Chinese investment and including Burma,” Girard said.

Girard says the increased fighting in Myanmar’s ethnic controlled Kachin State over the past year is directly linked to conflict over resource investment largely by Chinese businesses.

Myanmar, led by the military-backed civilian government of President Thein Sein, has been undergoing reforms over the past year to improve its human rights situation. But Naw San, General Secretary of the Students and Youth Congress Burma (Myanmar) says despite steps to peace talks with ethnic groups in Myanmar, the development process is still not inclusive.

“We are still worried that, like in the past, investment and development projects will be dealt with by the central government and that there will be (no real) engagement or consultations with the process on the ground,” Naw San told DW.

“What the ethnic (communities) need now is national equality,” he said.

Two thirds of Indigenous People live in Asia

The Asia Indigenous People’s Pact (AIPP) Foundation, in a separate report, noted that two thirds of the world’s 370 million self-identified indigenous peoples live in Asia.

And those people, according to the AIPP Foundation, “are currently marginalized and subordinated economically, politically and culturally.”

They are “overrepresented among the poor, illiterate, malnourished and stunted,” it said.

AIPP’s report says for many in the region “militarization, (the) plundering of resources, forced relocation, cultural genocide and discrimination in everyday life are common experiences.”

The report pointed to the construction of dams in Asia, which since the 1960s, has led to “massive displacements, loss of livelihoods, and food insecurity of indigenous peoples in India, the Philippines, Laos and Malaysia.”

Bernice See, an AIPP coordinator, said governments give priority to economic ventures and investments over people’s rights.

See called on Asia’s governments to respect the UN’s Declaration of the Rights of Indigenous peoples and the provisions calling for the “free prior of informed consent from any development that comes into their territory.”

“These governments should have the moral obligation to respect these agreements. The declaration should be used as a framework for dealing with indigenous people,” she said.

From DW: http://www.dw.de/indigenous-peoples-threatened-by-resource-exploitation/a-16065981

Ben Pennings: THIS is how you Send a Message to Big Coal!

Ben Pennings: THIS is how you Send a Message to Big Coal!

By Ben Pennings / Over Our Dead Bodies

Big Coal? We’re talking the biggest. The Galilee Basin is the biggest proposed coal complex in the world. The numbers are staggering, frightening; well past the point of insanity.

The great news is that the nine mines planned are very marginal economically. The ‘quality’ of coal is low, the price of coal is low, and the debt levels of many companies involved are high. However, a company called Aurizon is planning to bail out the debt-ridden company GVK, allowing them to dig up the first 2 mines. These mines alone would be responsible for carbon pollution 6 times that of the UK.

A broad cross-section of the mainstream environment movement have signalled their intentions towards Aurizon, but thus far been pretty much ignored. Millions of emails have gone unheard. Aurizon continues unabated towards investing billions to mine the Galilee Basin, before solar makes it completely economically unviable.

The Over Our Dead Bodies campaign is adding a new dimension to the decision-making processes of Aurizon, and has garnered significant interest from both the company and police. Aurizon now face sustained direct action and civil disobedience strategies, on top of the increasing pressure from mainstream groups. The campaign is blatantly honest, starting to document the number of activists in Australia and globally who will do whatever it takes to stop Aurizon.

Activists started the campaign by stealing a ‘carbon bomb’ from their offices, visiting the CEO’s mansion (twice) and messing with their football sponsorship. All in one weekend. While also hunger striking! But the real deal is still to come.

How can activists be honest with Aurizon about what may be on the way? Go along to their AGM of course! I was one of twelve activists who bought enough shares to attend and ask questions that were not the usual fare. For the first time in AGM history (as far as we know), activists asked audacious questions to directly challenge a company about the security, insurance, industrial action and recruitment costs related to direct action by environmental activists – providing an honest warning to shareholders of risks the company has thus far refused to disclose.

A multi-organisation protest was also held outside the AGM venue. Police inside and outside the AGM outnumbered protesters two to one – uniformed, plain clothes, photographers and high-ranking officers. Walking from our briefing to the venue, the anti-terrorism police made their presence known, greeting me by name. As did other officers throughout the morning. Nice to be loved! The leading image above shows one of the anti-terrorism police ‘Aaron’ (real name is Bruce) talking to an activist on the day.

Activists know they can’t stop Aurizon’s plans through appealing to their ethics or values. Those who have tried have failed. The chair of the board John Prescott confirmed this belief when answering the first question:

“The fundamental business of this company is transportation, the majority of it by heavy haul rail systems, and a key part of that is certainly the carriage of coal… it is a fundamental part of this company’s business to carry coal for interested customers. It is a perfectly legitimate activity and it is one that to withdraw from would not be in the interest of shareholders, customers, employees, and the communities in which we serve.”

He also admitted to shareholders in this first exchange that Aurizon “have not made any estimates” when asked about the costs of activism by organisations with many millions of members. This is an important admission but the point needed to be laboured. The next question about their security strategies got right to it:

“It seems to me that Aurizon are very vulnerable to direct action strategies from environmentalist groups. Given you have thousands of kilometres of rail line and have difficult to secure facilities around the country, what strategies do you have in mind to secure what seems to be in-securable?”

After questions about climate change, water and the future of coal, it got serious with a question about targeting the board and executives:

“As Aurizon’s planned investment in the coal mines in the Galilee Basin (involves releasing) truly massive amounts of carbon into the atmosphere, threatening life as we know it on this planet, such a radical step calls for a radical response. Are you aware that over two hundred activists from one group alone have thus far committed to use direct action against the Aurizon Board of Executives to remind them of their personal responsibility regarding runaway climate change; and given they claim to have home addresses of most of the board members and senior executives, and considering activists have already visited the CEO’s home twice, are you concerned that executives and board members will leave the company if they are seriously challenged in their homes and neighbourhoods about these responsibilities, their responsibilities beyond Aurizon, responsibilities to the future of all of our children, our grandchildren, the community, country and the world we live in?”

Despite protestations, a further audacious question was asked, this time about stopping trains with cardboard boxes:

“In 2011, an activist stopped a coal train in New South Wales using a lightweight box contraption. Now he was inside that box, but it’s easily conceivable that you could stop a coal train with an empty cardboard box. Now given you’ve got thousands of kilometres of track, how do you envisage oversight over those tracks and managing that; I can see it would be quite easy for activists to stop coal trains and get away with it scot free. So is there a cost each time a train is stopped like this, and have you factored those kinds of costs into your business plans?”

Just by chance, this happened to be outside the building when shareholders left the meeting. DSCF6847

You can imagine the company (and some shareholders) were not too happy with such questions. The chair of the board said repeatedly that they would not divulge security strategies, but it seemed reasonably clear such strategies did not exist. But the shareholders did respond with applause to the question about coal dust, public health, and the excessive salary of the CEO:

“My question is to Lance Hockridge, CEO, and my concern is about dust. I’ve been reading a bit in the media the last few months about coal dust coming from wagons and about the particles, and the doctors and health experts’ concerns about the dust particles; the larger ones and the smaller ones which can get lodged in the lungs and in the bloodstream and the concern, particularly for children… My question, given that Aurizon has so far refused to cover the coal wagons and that there is quite a bit of public outcry about this issue is, Lance, you earned $6 million more than the average Australian last financial year, would you personally be willing to donate some money to stop the damage to public health, and if not, would you personally live on a railway line and breathe in what you transport?”

That question was bound to be popular but this question hit a different nerve:

“Are you concerned that once environmental activists start direct action strategies that your unionised staff will undertake industrial action due to perceived safety risks? Have you factored in these potential massive costs to your investment in the Galilee?”

A shareholder responded to this, saying she was “absolutely appalled at the suggestion that lives would be put at risk because of ideological beliefs.” I jumped up to defend this activist before question time ended. It is Aurizon in fact who are putting millions of lives at risk over an ideological belief, the belief that profit by any legal means trumps ethical considerations, or a livable planet for that matter. After the AGM some shareholders spoke freely with activists. Many were concerned about climate change, coal dust, and the shortening future of the coal industry. Aurizon have since sent a strongly worded legal letter, threatening a Supreme Court injunction against Generation Alpha, Over Our Dead Bodies and their ‘members’. What a shame that Generation Alpha is a Facebook page, Over Our Dead Bodies is a website, and neither have members! Aurizon write that they are ‘disappointed’ in us, and if we do what they say we’ve threatened, we’re in big trouble! But now they just have to wait and prepare, knowing they can do little to stop the next move by the 221 (and counting) activists who have said “Over Our Dead Bodies”.

Press Release: REAL (Resistance Education At Libraries) project now up!

Press Release: REAL (Resistance Education At Libraries) project now up!

Deep Green Resistance has just updated the REAL: Resistance Education At Libraries project. This easy to use website helps identify libraries lacking our targeted resistance media, and makes it easier to contact each library or “Suggest a purchase” to fill in the gaps. The new updates include an improved user interface, many new libraries from college towns, and libraries in Canada.

REAL initially focuses on three foundational works of the Deep Green Resistance and strategic anti-civ movement:

  • Deep Green Resistance by Derrick Jensen, Aric McBay, and Lierre Keith is crucial reading for anyone who has accepted that civilization is destroying the planet, but hasn’t known how to respond. This is the single most useful book to grow our movement of strategically thinking resisters. Deep Green Resistance is a plan of action for anyone determined to fight for this planet — and win.
  • Endgame, by Derrick Jensen, gives readers a crash course in anti-civ critique, an excellent and (relatively) succinct summary of what’s wrong with this culture and why. Many people already know this in their bones, but will benefit from Jensen’s eloquence and analysis to help them piece together a coherent big picture. By challenging readers to seriously ask themselves what it will take to make them fight back, and what that might look like for them as individuals and as a movement, this volume builds an important foundation for Deep Green Resistance. This book has awakened and radicalized many people, and has the potential to reach many more.
  • Franklin Lopez’ film END:CIV offers a powerful visual introduction to some of Endgame‘s premises and arguments, on which it is based. The movie simultaneously presents some of the worst atrocities of civilization and argues for the necessity of fighting back. It has the potential to reach many people new to anti-civ critique who otherwise might not pick up one of the above books for a “casual” read.

Many people first came to their awareness of the problems of civilization and the need to fight back thanks to these works. Getting them into public libraries will make them more accessible to people who find them by accident, or who seek them out after hearing about Deep Green Resistance and anti-civ activism.

You can help by using the website tools to make suggestions to your local library and to encourage friends and family to do the same. You can also contribute funds to help us donate copies of these media to libraries which can’t afford them from their own acquisition budgets.

To learn more about the project, or to get started, please visit http://deepgreenresistance.org/libraries

Tepco workers begin year-long operation to remove spent Fukushima fuel rods

By Justin McCurry and Simon Tisdall / The Guardian

Workers have begun the delicate task of removing spent fuel rods from a damaged reactor at the Fukushima Daiichi nuclear power plant, more than two-and-a-half years after the facility suffered a triple meltdown.

The operation to remove more than 1,331 used fuel assemblies, and 202 unused assemblies, began on Monday and is expected to take just over a year. Decommissioning the entire site is expected to take at least 30 years.

The plant’s operator, Tokyo Electric Power [Tepco], said the fuel removal was an important step in decommissioning the plant, which experienced multiple meltdowns and explosions after Japan’s north-east coast was hit by a powerful earthquake and tsunami in March 2011.

Tepco brushed off fears that removing the spent fuel rods from a storage pool near the roof of reactor No4 could cause a serious accident. Some experts have warned that a collision involving the fuel assemblies, a sudden loss of coolant water or another big earthquake could cause a chain reaction and the release of huge quantities of radiation into the atmosphere.

Reactor No4 was closed for routine maintenance at the time of the disaster and so did not suffer a meltdown. But a hydrogen explosion on 15 March 2011 blew the walls and roof off the reactor building, leaving it vulnerable to further damage from earthquakes.

The utility has since reinforced the building with a huge steel canopy and insists the structure can withstand seismic events of the same intensity that shook the plant in March 2011.

But it conceded that the fuel assemblies needed to be moved to a safer storage site as soon as possible.

“After the explosion, one big challenge was to deal with the spent fuel pool because if the water evaporated it would cause a radioactive cloud stretching all the way to Tokyo, which would have to be evacuated,” Yuichi Okamura, deputy manager of the water treatment department at Fukushima Daiichi, told the Guardian on Monday.

“It was a big challenge, so today is a big success for the cleanup teams.”

Yoshimi Hitosugi, a Tepco spokesman, said: “This is an important moment. It is one big step towards decommissioning the reactor.” He added that three fuel assemblies had been discovered that were damaged prior to the tsunami and measures were being taken to deal with them.

Hitosugi said the firm was confident that the workers would be able to cope with any debris caused by the explosion that remained in the spent fuel pool, adding that it would not compromise the fuel removal operation.

Tepco’s president, Naomi Hirose, said the fuel extraction “represents the beginning of a new and important chapter in our work”, and thanked plant workers for the “ingenuity, diligence, and courage that made this achievement possible”.

The utility believes that a specially chosen team of 36 men will need until late 2014 to remove all of the fuel assemblies from the pool, located 130 feet above ground, and place them in submerged protective casks. The casks will then be taken to ground level and transported to a more stable storage pool nearby.

Each cask can hold up 22 assemblies comprising between 60 and 80 fuel rods. Workers will remove the fresh fuel assemblies first because they are easier to handle.

“The extraction work started at 3:18pm and the first fuel completed its extraction from the fuel rack to the cask placed inside the pool at 3:57pm as planned, following thorough safety preparations with the co-operation of many partner companies and individual workers,” Tepco said in a statement.

But anti-nuclear campaigners have voiced concern over Tepco’s ability to complete the work without incident following revelations that up to 300 tonnes of radioactive water are leaking from the site into the sea every day.

The utility also came under fire this summer for installing poorly designed tanks that leaked toxic water.

“We are concerned that Tepco may not be capable of conducting this risky operation safely, and that there are significant risks involved in this operation,” said Kazue Suzuki, a nuclear campaigner with Greenpeace Japan.

“Tepco’s inability to solve the problems with leaking tanks that store contaminated water, and the continued flow of contaminated water from the site to the ocean adds to our concerns about its ability to handle this dangerous operation to remove spent fuel.

“If Tepco makes mistakes again and can’t handle this task, workers could be exposed to excessive levels of radiation and in a worst-case scenario there could be a massive new release of radiation to the atmosphere.”

Read more from The Guardian: http://www.theguardian.com/environment/2013/nov/18/fukushima-nuclear-power-workers-spent-fuel-rod-removal