American Association for the Advancement of Science - Douglas Starr*
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| The output of this oil refinery in Rodeo, California, is a small part of Richard Heede's carbon inventory. Noah Berger |
Last month, geographer Richard Heede received a subpoena from
Representative Lamar Smith (R-TX), chairman of the House of
Representatives Committee on Science, Space, and Technology. Smith, a
climate change doubter, became concerned when the attorneys general of
several states launched investigations into whether ExxonMobil had
committed fraud by sowing doubts about climate change even as its own
scientists knew it was taking place. The congressman suspected a
conspiracy between the attorneys general and environmental advocates,
and he wanted to see all the communications among them. Predictably, his
targets included advocacy organizations such as Greenpeace, 350.org,
and the Union of Concerned Scientists. They also included Heede, who
works on his own aboard a rented houseboat on San Francisco Bay in
California.
Heede is less well known than his fellow recipients, but his work is
no less threatening to the fossil fuel industry. Heede (pronounced
"Heedie") has compiled a massive database quantifying who has been
responsible for taking carbon out of the ground and putting it into the
atmosphere. Working alone, with uncertain funding, he spent years
piecing together the annual production of every major fossil fuel
company since the Industrial Revolution and converting it to carbon
emissions.
Carbon dioxide emissions from Carbon Majors
Heede's research shows that nearly two-thirds of anthropogenic carbon emissions originated in just 90 companies and government-run industries. Among them, the top eight companies -- ranked according to annual and cumulative emissions below -- account for 20 percent of world carbon emissions from fossil fuels and cement production since the Industrial Revolution.
The results showed that nearly two-thirds
of the major industrial greenhouse gas emissions (from fossil fuel use,
methane leaks, and cement manufacture) originated in just 90 companies
around the world, which either emitted the carbon themselves or supplied
carbon ultimately released by consumers and industry. As Heede told
The Guardian newspaper, you could take all the decision-makers and CEOs of these companies and fit them on a couple Greyhound buses.
The study provoked controversy when it was published in 2013, with
some complaining that it unfairly held the fossil fuel industry
responsible for the lifestyle choices made by billions of consumers.
"It's a cop-out to blame the producers of products that we have
demanded, and benefited from, for more than a century,"
wrote Severin Borenstein, a business and public policy expert at the
University of California (UC), Berkeley, in a blog post.
Others, however, saw the study as a turning point in the debate about
apportioning responsibility for climate change. With traditional
environmental issues, such as river pollution or toxic waste, it has
always been possible to identify perpetrators who could be targeted for
regulation or enforcement. But greenhouse gases are emitted everywhere,
in every process that involves combustion. "For decades there's been a
persistent myth that everyone is responsible, and if everyone is
responsible then no one is responsible," says Carroll Muffett, president
and CEO of the Center for International Environmental Law in
Washington, D.C., who also serves on the board of a nonprofit
that Heede co-founded. "Rick's work for the first time identifies a
discrete class of defendants."
Heede's carbon accounting is already opening a new chapter in climate
change litigation and policy, helping equip plaintiffs who believe they
have suffered damages from climate change to claim compensation.
"Rick's work really helps connect the dots," says Marco Simons, general
counsel of EarthRights International, a Washington, D.C.-based legal
group that defends the rights of the poor. "He hasn't sought out the
spotlight, but I think his work is tremendously important."
Counting Carbon
Heede tallies carbon obsessively. When we discussed my plans to fly
out from Boston to Sausalito, California, where his houseboat is
anchored, he did a quick calculation and told me that my share of the
flights would add 716 kilograms of carbon to the atmosphere. "And if
you'd driven an average car the trip would be 1.78 tons of CO
2 [carbon
dioxide]" he added, apparently riffing on his own compulsiveness.
During my visit I noticed that when he boiled water to make noodles for
lunch he put a frying pan on the pot instead of a lid—to preheat the pan
so it would use a tiny bit less fuel to heat up the stir-fry. "It's a
practice of mine to figure out how I can minimize energy use."
He was born in Norway into a long line of watchmakers, which may
contribute to his own meticulousness. At 15, he and his parents
immigrated to the United States. His father was a consulting engineer,
but the younger Heede wasn't keen on "fixing problems that should not
have been created in the first place"—which, he admits, is exactly what
he's doing these days.
Heede has spent most of his life in Colorado, and he has the
solid build and weathered face of someone who has spent lots of time in
the mountains. He earned undergraduate and master's degrees in geography
at the University of Colorado, Boulder, and then joined forces with
Amory Lovins, the soft-energy guru who co-founded the Rocky Mountain
Institute in Boulder. Ronald Reagan had just been elected president, and
his administration moved to gut subsidies for alternative energy
sources, claiming that they were not economically
competitive. Heede tested that assertion, analyzing the federal budget
to find the hidden subsidies to the coal and oil industries, even
including the cost of treating workers who developed black lung disease
from coal mining.
Contrary to Reagan administration claims, Heede showed that the vast
bulk of federal energy subsidies went to conventional energy sources. He
wrote a report, testified to Congress, and wrote an opinion piece in
The Wall Street Journal. "I don't recall getting any calls as a result," he says. It was an early taste of working in obscurity.
In 2003, he left the Rocky Mountain Institute to form Climate
Mitigation Services, a consulting firm specializing in surveying and
mitigating greenhouse gas emissions. One of his early clients was Aspen,
Colorado, a rich and progressive ski town whose leaders wanted to act
decisively to reduce emissions. They hired Heede to do a baseline
greenhouse gas inventory with the broadest possible scope—including not
only activities within the city, but the cars and airplanes that
annually brought in hundreds of thousands of tourists … in
short, Heede recalls, "everything that uses energy as a result of
Aspen's existence."
The exercise raised fascinating questions, Heede says: "What is a
community, and what is a boundary? There's leakage everywhere:
airplanes, trucks, cars, visitors. How do you quantify that stuff?"
Heede interviewed airport managers and checked their logs to find out
which aircraft served the more than 178,000 annual passengers,
calculating fuel consumption and emissions for each flight. Standing at
the main bridge into Aspen for hours at a time, he categorized the cars
that went by—sedans, SUVs, trucks, vans. Then, he used his records to
estimate emissions from the 13,000 vehicles tabulated by an automated
counter each day. In the end, he determined that in 2004, Aspen was
responsible for more than 840,000 tons of carbon emissions—"roughly
equivalent to a large, diesel-powered aircraft carrier running flank
speed at all times." This and subsequent reports enabled the city to
reduce its emissions despite a growing population and economy.
The carbon ripples
Aspen was an early test of Heede's ability to gather information and
see beyond obvious boundaries—the invisible ripples from every project
that affect the infinitely interconnected atmosphere. In the
early 2000s, for example, an Australian firm proposed building a
liquefied natural gas terminal off the California coast. It seemed a
good way to transition to a low-carbon "bridge" fuel. But, Heede says,
"They hadn't done any work on life cycle emissions." When he tallied all
the direct and indirect emissions—from the gas extraction in Australia
to distribution in California—he found that the project would have
produced nearly a third more carbon than anticipated. His analysis
helped persuade California officials to vote it down.
Later, he tackled targets that produce bigger but more diffuse
ripples. Several U.S. cities and environmental groups were suing the
Export-Import Bank of the United States and the Overseas Private
Investment Corporation, alleging the institutions were financing
projects that would damage Earth's climate. The plaintiffs
retained Heede to analyze the carbon emissions resulting from the banks'
loans and investments around the world, from a gas project in Central
Africa to a coal mine in Poland. He found that the projects were
directly and indirectly emitting nearly 2 billion metric tons of CO
2 per
year—almost 8% of the world's emissions. The plaintiffs won: The banks
agreed to conduct environmental impact statements, create
carbon-sensitive policies, and increase their financing of renewable
energy projects.
Meanwhile, a new idea was coalescing in the environmental law
community. For years, attorneys had litigated so-called environmental
justice cases to redress the fact that poor
people disproportionately suffer from pollution. By the early 2000s, it
was becoming clear that the poor will also face the heaviest impacts of
climate change. But how do you structure a liability case when the
entire world takes part in the carbon economy? Can a Pacific Islander
whose town has been flooded sue 7 billion people? Searching for more
specific culprits, Peter Roderick, head of the Climate
Justice Programme for Greenpeace International in London,
commissioned Heede to study ExxonMobil and quantify total greenhouse
emissions across its history.
Frankly, we're all the users and therefore we're all guilty.
David Victor, University of California, San Diego
He would have to follow a tangled corporate path. Founded as
Standard Oil by John D. Rockefeller in 1870, the company became one of
the world's largest multinationals until 1911, when the Supreme Court
split it into several "baby Standards." Decades later, two of the
largest of those firms merged to form ExxonMobil. Heede tracked down
production figures in annual reports scattered among university archives
on two continents, supplemented by court documents, news reports, and
academic and industry papers. Then he converted production volumes to CO
2 and
methane. He included direct emissions, for instance from the fuels used
to run the company's operations, and indirect emissions released by the
combustion of its products.
After 15 months of research, Heede concluded that ExxonMobil and its
precursors had directly or indirectly emitted 20.3 billion metric tons
of CO
2 and 199 million metric tons of methane. Friends of the
Earth calculated that the quantity represented between 4.7% and 5.3% of
humanity's industrial greenhouse gas emissions since 1882.
"I thought, 'This is exactly the kind of thing I had in mind,'"
Roderick recalls. "But I knew it was just a small part of the big
picture."
The major league
Roderick commissioned Heede to look at the entire fossil fuel
industry. To make the project manageable, they limited it to companies
that produced at least 8 million tons of carbon per year, the so-called
"carbon majors." The research took 8 years. Money from the original
grant ran out, and after the crash of 2008 Heede's consulting business
collapsed. He maxed out his credit card, borrowed against his Colorado
house, and scraped by, enlisting graduate students in several countries
to photocopy and send him papers, which he checked
and double-checked with a watchmaker's precision. He filled shelves with
binders of information and spent thousands of hours entering it into
spreadsheets, working alone, often until midnight. "I take pleasure in
that kind of stuff," Heede says. "I like to pay attention to detail."
Sitting at dual monitors in the captain's cabin of his
houseboat, Heede takes me on a tour of his data set, a seemingly endless
series of color-coded and cross-indexed spreadsheets. Each sheet lists
hundreds of entries, with columns showing the year and total production
volumes for products such as crude oil, natural gas, and varieties of
coal. Clicking on a company's name opens additional spreadsheets with
the company's year-by-year production, plus screenshots of its annual
reports for verification. Color-coded flowcharts display the evolution
of companies as they separated or merged. The flowcharts from Russia are
particularly ornate, as they incorporate the transformation of
companies after the fall of the Soviet Union. (Heede got production data
for the Soviet companies from Central Intelligence Agency analyses and
the International Energy Agency.) Detailed annotations reveal his
methods and calculations. The structure of these charts, so layered and
interlocking, seems almost medieval in its complexity, and Heede seems
monklike in his devotion to compiling it.
The result, peer reviewed and published in
Climatic Change,
showed that just 90 companies contributed 63% of the greenhouse gases
emitted globally between 1751 and 2010. Half of those emissions took
place after 1988—the year James Hansen of NASA testified to Congress
that there was no longer any doubt that global warming had begun.
The data "just blew me away," says Naomi Oreskes, a science historian at Harvard University and co-author of the book
Merchants of Doubt,
which compares the fossil fuel industry to the tobacco industry in its
efforts to raise doubts about science. "Everyone talks about this as a
problem since the Industrial Revolution, but I now think that's
incorrect," she says. Heede has shown that the roots of the problem are
more recent and easier to trace. In 2011, Oreskes joined Heede in
creating the Climate Accountability Institute, a nonprofit devoted to
quantifying the contribution of fossil fuel companies to climate change
and investigating their alleged attempts to obfuscate the science.
Sharing the blame
Other people criticize the work as oversimplified and naïve. David
Victor, a political scientist and energy policy specialist at UC San
Diego and a co-author of the 2015 Intergovernmental Panel on Climate
Change report, doesn't question Heede's numbers but says his approach is
wrongheaded. "It's part of a larger narrative of trying to create
villains; to draw lines between producers as responsible for the problem
and everyone else as victims. Frankly, we're all the users and
therefore we're all guilty. To create a narrative that involves
corporate guilt as opposed to problem-solving is not going to solve
anything."
Heede concedes that the responsibility is shared. "I as a consumer
bear some responsibility for my own car, etcetera. But we're living an
illusion if we think we're making choices, because the infrastructure
pretty much makes those choices for us." He focused on fossil fuel
companies, he says, because unlike industries that produce greenhouse
gases as a byproduct (such as the automobile industry, which has adhered
to increasingly strict mileage standards), the mission of fossil fuel
companies is to pull carbon out of the ground and put it into commerce.
His data, together with an emerging line of research that uses
computer models to discern how likely it is that a given storm, flood,
or heat wave was related to human-caused emissions, are now driving
efforts to allocate responsibility for climate change. Last year, for
instance, several nongovernmental organizations in the Philippines filed
a petition with that nation's Commission on Human Rights. It asks the
"carbon majors" to take remedial actions on behalf of typhoon survivors
in the islands, which suffer devastating storms that may have worsened
as a result of climate change. "Heede's report is one of the bedrock
pieces of science and research that helped form our campaign," says
Kristin Casper, litigation counsel for Greenpeace's Global Climate
Justice and Liability Project in Toronto, Canada. In late July, the
commission sent orders to 47 of the world's largest investor-owned
fossil fuel companies, asking them to respond to the human rights
charges in the petition. Similar actions and lawsuits are proceeding in
several other countries.
Now, Heede is extending his carbon accounting into the future,
quantifying the potential carbon release from future fossil fuel
exploration. Like the other recipients of Representative Smith's
subpoena, he has no intention of complying with what he calls a
"campaign to intimidate us and stop scientific research." At the same
time, he confesses an admiration for the fossil fuel industry, which has
made "fantastic efforts to find resources for the betterment of
humanity," often in the harshest environments. They've done such a good
job that we haven't paused to reflect on the unintended consequences, he
says. "And now we have to cope with the result."
*Douglas Starr is co-director of the Boston University Science Journalism Program
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