"PEOPLE WHO OWN hundreds of millions of dollars worth of shares in fossil fuel companies are also, of course, fabulously wealthy and leading fabulously carbon-intensive lifestyles, something Kenner’s figures don’t add to the pile, but he hopes that will be on people’s minds as they look through the database. What’s also key, he said, is to get a sense for just how much political weight these companies expend to keep the energy status quo going. Many of the heaviest hitters are also members of trade associations like the American Petroleum Institute, which aggressively lobbies U.S. elected officials for regulatory rollbacks and fossil fuel subsidies. And they give generously, through corporate PACs and personal donations, to politicians who will look out for their interests. Of course, the amount of extra emissions those donations are responsible for is difficult to quantify. Kenner also includes information, linking to the International Consortium of Investigative Journalists reporting on the Panama Papers, about each individual’s use of offshore tax havens, where applicable.
It is well established that the top brass of the fossil fuel industry wields enormous political power, Kenner says, and his project builds off the already existing research on that relationship. “What I’ve done is intentionally gone the next level down, from a faceless company to the individuals running it,” he told me, “to try and visibilize and make more tangible to people who the people are that are really contributing to climate change through their decisions.”
As fossil fuel companies and their trade associations continue to cozy up to national delegations at U.N. climate talks in order to shape policy made there, the report should cast doubt on the idea that they’re negotiating in good faith. “We really need to destabilize these companies while simultaneously increasing renewable energy. They will keep on coming back and back like zombies to resist progress,” Kenner said. “They’re hugely profitable and they’re never going to stop because fossil fuels are their lifeblood. … They will never be part of a transition to a world in which they do not exist.” Through analyzing participant lists from the last quarter-century of U.N. climate talks, a study from the Climate Investigations Center obtained by Agence France-Presse last week found that teams of representatives sent by fossil fuel interests have often outnumbered many national delegations; in all, these groups have sent 6,400 of their representatives to those gatherings since 1994. The U.N. Framework Convention on Climate Change, the body that convenes these representatives, currently has no conflict of interest policy to protect against industry influence, a situation that climate justice groups have been attempting to remedy at talks happening in Germany this week.
That the difference in influence and emissions between the polluter elite and the rest of us are so drastically different is what make Kenner skeptical that per capita emissions, a standard feature of carbon accounting, are a useful metric at all. At least, he says, they can’t be examined in a vacuum. “Per capita emissions linked to consumption are not good enough anymore. When somebody who’s richer leads such a more high-carbon lifestyle than someone who is poorer, it becomes meaningless to have an average carbon footprint,” he said. “I think that work has been very valuable, but we need to go deeper. We need to go into the actual differences within countries, and the reason for that is because there’s such high inequality.”
Even at the city level, average figures can mask vast differences, sometimes on a block-by-block basis. For one 2016 project, sociologist Daniel Aldana Cohen and researcher Kevin Ummel mapped out the relative carbon content of different New York City neighborhoods. Perhaps unsurprisingly, well-heeled Upper East Siders —neighbors to Fox News and David Koch — spewed far more carbon into the atmosphere than nearby working-class residents of East Williamsburg and Crown Heights. And while the rich are more prolific polluters than the poor, part of what Kenner hopes to highlight in his book and project is that consumption-based emissions have more to do with structural factors than individual choice.“The first thing to really look at is who profits from what,” he argued. “Clearly the people who are running the companies who sell [fossil fuels] profit from a transportation system which is based on them. They have an interest in it. Does the average citizen profit from that transportation system? Unless they hold shares in that company, probably not. And that person doesn’t have much influence over whether the buses are electric or diesel.”theintercept.com/...