The statement is flawed because it takes the personal responsibility out of those corporate profits. Oil production burns a lot of fuel but it’s profitable because I keep buying it. Cargo ships make a lot of emissions but it’s profitable because I keep buying foreign goods. Cow farms produce tons of methane but they’re so huge because I keep eating beef.

Corporations do not exist without the customer. Massive buyout conglomerations greatly misrepresent true pollution per industry production units. If I said ExxonMobil is the dirtiest company in the world, does that mean they’re polluting worse than BP? No, not by itself. You have to look at tons of oil produced between the two and figure out a pollution per ton figure. Would it make sense to say Amazon is a very clean business because part of their business uses unconditioned warehouses? Not really, you’d probably want to separate out their trucking and delivery divisions from their storage and then compare it to UPS and FedEx via gallons per ton delivered. I’ve even seen people argue their single-item order from Amazon isn’t wasteful because “the truck is coming by anyway”. No! The truck is not an autonomous sushi conveyor belt swinging by. It’s a business asset being routed to customers.

I’m not saying these corporations are good or clean. I’m not saying they don’t cheat, lie, hide, and bribe governments to ignore their hazards. I’m just saying you can’t take a 100% hands off view of the issue, either. I drive a cleaner car and drive less so Exxon makes less. I wait for my ordering needs to build up a little to improve efficiency of the delivery. I buy more local and national so I don’t demand a cargo ship to carry my trinkets. Obviously it’s not perfect and I have a very, very minor impact, but that’s the whole point of being in a society. A community works together for the common good.

Is that methodology also how the CDP works? I am looking at https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Top_contributors_to_climate_change#All_cause_1+3_cumulative_emissions_[8] in particular, and the figures aren’t looking ridiculously better still.

Or is that the difference between the Scope 1+3 tables and the All cause table in this page?

edit: Snopes has in fact written a fact check that corroborates the methodology used by CDP is potentially flawed for this exact reason. So it will not be accurate - https://www.snopes.com/fact-check/corporations-greenhouse-gas/.

I’ll defer to the following point by the original Twitter OP though, which I still think is valid: “The point I was trying to make is that any media coverage that reduces the issue to personal choices is incomplete, and [structural] issues should always be central to climate reporting,” Johnson told us. “Individuals’ choices are not unimportant. They just shouldn’t be the focus of climate coverage.”

tl;dr: Yes, personal responsibility and reducing one’s carbon footprint is also very important, but there is chronic under-reporting on the other end of the equation.

still better than the opposite, where you’re just trying to buy food but everything comes in some shitty packaging made of hydrocarbons and it will be counted as your individual contribution to the waste problem. regulation works (that’s why they oppose it so hard) and it works a lot better than “voting with your wallet” which is what we would be supposed to do if it was up to us – where certain people have a hell of a lot more votes than we do

That’s interesting I wasn’t aware of this. Would you by chance have a source for this data? I’d be interested to see the true numbers.