Their methodology is extremely suspect in my opinion, as they attribute "shareholder emissions" to anyone that owns 10% or more of a company. Direct quote from their doc:

> a person with a 20% share in a company has 20% of its emissions allocated to their shareholder emissions

While shareholders obviously hold a greater degree of control over a company's emissions than a random consumer, assigning 100% of the blame for oil company emissions to the owners and 0% to people buying oil seems insane.

Also, filtering only for owners that control a 10% or higher stake masively skews the results as large portions of companies are held by the general public in much smaller quantities via 401ks, pensions, etc.

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Ericson2314 2 hours ago | parent | next [-]

If they take both supply chains of consumption and ownership into account, they are straight-up double-counting, unless they are separating opex and capex or something.

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ecocentrik an hour ago | parent | prev | next [-]

The comparison to the poorest 3.5b is also not as useful as comparing the top 0.1% to the top 10%, which I would imagine pollute orders of magnitude more than the top 0.1%. I'm sure they're both shocking numbers compared to humans living sedentary agrarian lifestyles.

	▲	wisty an hour ago \| parent [-]
		Nitpick, the top 10% are probably not 100x worse than the 0.1% (they are only 100x more numerous). But yeah it's rage bait to ignore basically 99% of the people in 1st world countries.

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what 2 hours ago | parent | prev | next [-]

> large portions of companies are held by the general public in much smaller quantities via 401ks, pensions, etc.

Considering everyone is in index (or mutual) funds these days, do they actually own any shares in the underlying companies? I’m not sure they do? The fund surely owns shares of various companies, but the holders of the fund aren’t shareholders in the underlying companies.

Perhaps this is a silly point to make, but the fund providers will show up as 10% owners if the general public has any significant stake in these companies.

	▲	thenewnewguy an hour ago \| parent [-]
		I haven't done a super deep dive but from what I can tell, they only considered individual people that own a 10% stake, not other holders like index funds.

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throwaway27448 2 hours ago | parent | prev | next [-]

There is little utility in blaming consumers for the crimes of capital. Consumers are going to consume. Capital is the entity with directable responsibility (if only via state violence). Why not just shake your fist at the tide coming in for all the good this "blame" does?

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thenewnewguy an hour ago | parent | next [-]

It matters because to actually improve things in society we need to identify the true root causes.

Blaming the owners of oil companies doesn't help fix emissions problems, becuse oil companies are going to pollute a ton essentially regardless of who owns them. The real solution to that problem is to reduce the global consumption and demand for oil.

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throwaway27448 26 minutes ago | parent [-]

> The real solution to that problem is to reduce the global consumption and demand for oil.

Blindly hoping humans choose to behave differently without removing the pressures that cause them to act such a way is fucked up. The way you reduce demand in a capitalist society is by beating board members to death until society "decides" to improve.

Or we could figure out a collectively rational way to manage the economy, the blood flow of all humanity. Just a thought. Or we could stick to hope and drive humanity off a cliff

	▲	thenewnewguy 7 minutes ago \| parent [-]
		I'm not sure why you think my solution would be blindly hoping? We change things in modern society with laws (and enforcement for those laws). For example, many countries are already passing laws to limit the sale of new ICE vehicles and/or to provide incentives to own electric vehicles. And these laws are effective - we can track new vehicle sales and see that we are tending in a positive direction.

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Ericson2314 an hour ago | parent | prev [-]

If the farmer didn't buy electric tractors, it's not really your fault. But if you drive a gas vehicle yes it's your fault.

	▲	throwaway27448 an hour ago \| parent [-]
		> But if you drive a gas vehicle yes it's your fault. Ok well people are obviously going to keep doing it, so what is the point of caring about fault to begin with if you can't do anything about it? We at least have legal control over capital. Anyway you can blame basically anything on the masses of people; it's just a fucking stupid train of thought with (again) zero utility. It's the nonreligious liberal version of praying to stop school shootings.

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lostlogin 2 hours ago | parent | prev [-]

> While shareholders obviously hold a greater degree of control over a company's emissions than a random consumer, assigning 100% of the blame for oil company emissions to the owners and 0% to people buying oil seems insane.

But what’s the appropriate allocation? I don’t think it’s zero. It shouldn’t be a larger percentage than their shareholding.

There are other examples. Eg someone who manufactures or sells dangerous items. Drugs, alcohol, guns.

They have some degree of liability in many jurisdictions. They aren't entirely responsible for what their products do. But are they zero percent responsible?

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Ericson2314 an hour ago | parent | next [-]

There is no right answer re blaming the customer or owner. This is push vs pull.

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slopinthebag an hour ago | parent | prev [-]

one question we could ask is, how much carbon emissions would these allocations represent if there were no consumers?

that answer might be a more accurate number than the percentage of their shareholding.

	▲	lostlogin an hour ago \| parent \| next [-]
		Is this an argument about free markets and regulation? Eg should the responsibility be on tobacco smokers to look after themselves, or governments to regulate/restrict/ban.
	▲	milch 35 minutes ago \| parent \| prev [-]
		It would be a bit of a dishonest question in my opinion. Take the oil and car industry in the US for example. They've spent the past 70 years or so dismantling alternative transport infrastructure (among other things...). So how are we now going to assign the blame to the guy driving his car to work, instead of taking the bus that takes 4x as long, requires 3 transfers, and has people openly taking drugs on it? In the ideal world, sure, there would be a fair and even playing field of alternatives and the blame would 100% lie with the consumers who choose from this totally even field of possibilities. But we don't live in that ideal world.