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SL Staff B

• 4 min read

The James Webb space telescope does its imaging magic 1.5 million kilometres from Earth. Webb's orbit is a great place for delicate detection work: nowhere near our throbbing, glowing, raucous home. Webb's success depends on getting far enough away to allow it to resolve things with clarity.

When you consider greenhouse gas emissions, distance counts for a lot, too. Problems change dramatically as perspective shifts, depending on where you choose to tally up environmental impacts.

By agreement, national greenhouse gas inventories reported to the IPCC (Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change) include emissions only from products consumed within a country. The inventories disregard the country of origin.

In a way, this makes perfect sense. A 10,000-litre storage tank of diesel only emits carbon when it is consumed. Where it's stored shouldn't matter.

But storage is NOT the same as production. Shift your view to the global scale, and "follow the carbon."

The entire carbon-producing chain could not exist without nations and corporations that refine and export fossil fuels. They are responsible for much more than the national greenhouse gas fossil-fuel inventory as reported to the IPCC.
Figure 1: Domestic (blue) vs exported (gold) CO2 from fossil fuels.

The numbers behind this chart are drawn from impressive work by Climate Action Tracker (CAT).1 Their innovative graphic representations of fossil-fuel exports and related data are certainly worth your time. CAT have tackled difficult boundary and inclusion problems to develop a sophisticated global picture of fossil fuel exports, which they contrast with domestic consumption. They've done a good job. We urge you to visit their site.

Be clear about the IPCC's approach to inventories: it is not wrong. The way the numbers are reported is very useful. "Polluter pays", right?

In the lethal reach of illicit drugs, the gore and horror of gun violence, and the needless deaths caused by the tobacco industry, people have gradually come to see true solutions that embrace the entire chain of abuse, from producer to victim. Do guns, gun manufacturers, or shooters kill people?

And so ... everyone who wants to win the climate fight should be aware that accounting for emissions at the point of emission masks an important consideration: the origin of the fossil fuels and the profit motive behind that production.

In a very real sense, user-emissions tracking kicks the oil can down the road, often all the way to the consumer.2 In the IPCC's carbon accounting, a country isn't responsible for the fossil fuels it produces and exports. A company isn't responsible for the fossil fuels IT produces, either. From this perspective, the fossil-fuel market can be viewed as nothing but demand: whoever uses the fossil fuel takes it on the chin.

Fossil fuel extractors can accurately insist they are responding to demands in a world that needs energy. When those fuels are exported, the nations collecting fossil fuel royalties and the companies reaping windfall profits are dissociated from the environmental and social costs of the emissions.

Just as Norway's domestic consumption is impressively low, so too can fossil-fuel producers be considered net-zero operations.

Thirty-six fossil fuel companies produce fuels that generate over half the world's carbon-dioxide emissions.3, 4 End-user carbon accounting enables some gob-smacking statements from these companies. For example, Saudi Aramco, which —if it were a nation— would be the fourth-largest emitter of CO2 in the world,5 has announced a 2050 net-zero goal.6 Canada's bitumen company Cenovus7 and Australia's mining and coal giant BHP8 (and many other fossil fuel companies) have made 2050 net-zero commitments. And they all have a good chance of meeting them. Except, of course, for the fact that their products, if used as directed, will change our climate in very unpleasant ways.

Under the current method of tracking emissions, everything gets counted where it is consumed. Such accounting focuses the attention of nations, corporations, governments, and individuals on important questions of efficiency and conservation. It makes us think hard about what the world will be like in 2050.

But understand the dynamics of our greenhouse gas problem: to manage fossil fuels, we must track and manage both supply and demand ... and remember that making fossil fuels is as much a part of the problem as their use.
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Reading

  1. “Highlighting the Hypocrisy: Fossil Fuel Export Emissions.” Accessed February 27, 2025. https://climateactiontracker.org/blog/highlighting-the-hypocrisy-fossil-fuel-export-emissions/.
  2. Munoz, Sarah M. “How Oil Companies Put the Responsibility for Climate Change on Consumers.” The Conversation, October 11, 2023. http://theconversation.com/how-oil-companies-put-the-responsibility-for-climate-change-on-consumers-214132.
  3. Euronews. “Half Global Emissions Tied to Just 36 Companies, Report Finds,” 17:03:01 +01:00. https://www.euronews.com/green/2025/03/05/these-36-fossil-fuel-firms-are-responsible-for-half-of-global-emissions-report-reveals.
  4. Igini, Martina. “36 Fossil Fuel Giants Account For Half of World’s CO2 Emissions.” Earth.Org, March 11, 2025. https://earth.org/36-fossil-fuel-giants-responsible-for-half-of-worlds-co2-emissions-report/.
  5. InfluenceMap. “Home.” Accessed March 11, 2025. https://carbonmajors.org/index.html.
  6. “How Saudi Aramco Aims for Net-Zero Emissions,” October 25, 2024. https://anba.com.br/en/how-saudi-aramco-aims-for-net-zero-emissions/.
  7. “Cenovus Releases 2020 Environmental, Social & Governance Data Report.” Accessed March 11, 2025. https://www.cenovus.com/News-and-Stories/News-releases/2021/2254695.
  8. “Climate Transition Action Plan | BHP.” Accessed March 11, 2025. https://www.bhp.com/sustainability/climate-change/climate-transition-action-plan.

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