The Climate Crisis Goes Far Beyond Fossil Fuel Companies
We should not miss the forest for the trees
Each Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) report is divided into three parts: physical science, impacts, and mitigation; in other words: what is happening, why it matters, and what to do about it. The mitigation section of the IPCC’s Sixth Assessment was released yesterday.
This report predictably states that we need to urgently stop greenhouse gas emissions (peaking within three years, halving in eight), which are still increasing and primarily come from burning fossil fuels for energy. The IPCC estimates keeping global warming under 2°C would require leaving as much as $4 trillion worth of known fossil fuel reserves in the ground, and obviously much more to limit warming even further (which we absolutely must try to do).
Many people lay the blame for governments’ failure to meaningfully reduce emissions thus far entirely on the fossil fuel industry that controls these assets and stands to profit most from them, or even just the CEOs and executives that run these companies. It is obviously a powerful industry that donates to and lobbies politicians a great deal, plays a huge role in obstruction and misinformation, and many communities depend on the tax revenue from fossil fuel extraction to fund their government services.
Fossil fuels are highly concentrated sources of energy, and this property therefore facilitates concentrations of power in human societies. The energy density of fossil fuels makes them valuable and useful commodities, which in and of itself creates vast sums of wealth (and therefore power) that flow throughout society as they power literal and metaphorical engines. You may have heard that 100 corporations are responsible for 71% of (industrial) greenhouse gas emissions. This statistic rightly directs our focus upstream to the points of fossil fuel production, but I think the idea of responsibility here obscures the agency and dependency of all sorts of other actors and interests.
Oil, coal, and gas are the lifeblood of the world’s economy; virtually every aspect of the modern industrial world was developed by and with fossil fuels. Not only are they used for electricity, they are used to make steel and cement, provide heat, make plastics, power the machinery needed to extract and build machinery and infrastructure, fuel transportation, and produce synthetic fertilizer for industrial agriculture. Some of these things can be converted to run on renewable energy, others are very difficult or impossible, particularly at or near the scale of current usage.
Additionally, fossil fuels are not the only source of greenhouse gas emissions. Around a quarter of human-caused emissions come from agriculture (primarily nitrous oxide and methane) and land-use change (e.g., deforestation and ecosystem degradation). Reversing these land-use changes—like restoring forests, peatlands, grasslands, and wetlands—is a vital means of carbon sequestration (and mitigating the biodiversity crisis), but when left to markets either does not happen or is done in an ineffective and unjust manner.
For these reasons, many industries and sectors of capital have a significant incentive to slow or outright oppose serious, material climate mitigation (not to mention repairing other sources of environmental harm and injustice). The military-industrial complex requires fossil fuels for the foreseeable future for tanks, jets, missiles, etc. Industrial agriculture corporations need fossil fuel-derived fertilizers and pesticides and to produce methane-emitting waste. Real estate developers have no interest in stringent, eco-friendly building codes that erode their margins. Financiers do not want to lose profitable investments.
Examining the political economy of greenhouse gas emissions reveals a constellation of powerful interests in opposition to the health and well-being of the vast majority of life on this planet, present and future. Preserving a habitable biosphere requires trillions of dollars in fossil fuels remaining untapped, and when you extend that out to all of the dependencies and systems of exploitation and extraction driving greenhouse gas emissions, the sum is incalculable; many companies and industries have to shrink or die, and many people need to forego vast sums of wealth and power. As the IPCC noted in their technical summary:
The interaction between politics, economics, and power relationships is central to explaining why broad commitments do not always translate to urgent action.
Right now our society is operating on the timeline of not only the fossil fuel industry, but profit. We need to operate on the timeline of people and the planet instead.


What I’m Reading
Shifting Mining From the Global South Misses the Point of Climate Justice (Thea Riofrancos): Transitioning to a society that runs on renewable energy instead of fossil fuels is not a transition away from extraction, but towards different types and (potentially) degrees. Consequently, the US is trying to onshore some of this necessary extraction for critical minerals like lithium. Thea provides an excellent analysis of the challenges and pitfalls of this effort, particularly when the underlying power relations and economic model are not in question, along with pointing towards what more just and sustainable regimes could look like.
A Green New Deal for Public Farmland (Kendall Dix): This is an outstanding, thorough plan for beginning the necessary process of transforming the unjust and unsustainable US agriculture system. Kendall shows why ownership of farmland is so important and how putting it into public hands can be done.
Methane Leaks in New Mexico Far Exceed Current Estimates, Study Suggests (Maggie Astor): Gas is often sold as a bridge fuel between coal and renewables because it has lower CO2 emissions than the former. But because it is literally methane, a powerful greenhouse gas itself, any leaks at any point in the gas infrastructure and supply chain have serious consequences. This new analysis shows far higher leaks than expected in drilling in the Permian Basin, which suggests that gas may be just as bad as coal when it comes to the climate.
Microplastics found in human blood for first time (Damian Carrington): Plastic is literally everywhere now, including in our bloodstreams. It is unavoidable. We have evidence that plastics disrupt hormones, but we really do not know the breadth and depth of the negative effects of this plastic ubiquity yet. This is basically one big, awful experiment that we never consented to.