The geographer Richard Heede got in trouble the world’s leading companies to account for their emissions of greenhouse gases.
Richard Heede is a methodical guy.Someone who likes to “pay attention to the details.” It was a necessary quality when calculating emissions of gasesgreenhouse generated by the world ‘s leading companies. For years, with few resources, Heede was devoted to digging in archives and reports from the industrial era to today.When he finished the task, he concluded that only 90 companies originated two – thirds of global emissions of greenhouse gases. And, therefore, they are responsible for climate change.
Heede was born in Norway but raised in the United States. When studying geography at the University of Colorado, as told by journalist Douglas Starr in the journal Science, he became interested in the subsidies that the government of Ronald Reagan gave to the fossil fuel industry and the elimination of support for renewable energy. Thus he began to dive into one of the biggest challenges facing the planet: climate change.
In 2003, the municipal government of Aspen, Colorado, hired him to calculate all emissions ofCO2 of that locality. Heede designed a methodology and began collecting the data. Calculated the number generated by all air travel made by the inhabitants of the city emissions. Also tons of CO2 corresponding to all movements of about 13,000 vehicles Aspen.
This work caught the attention of Peter Roderick, Climate Justice Program of Greenpeace .Roderick asked him to calculate the emissions of CO2 generated throughout its history by the company Exxon. After fifteen months in which he dug in archives since 1870 on two continents, he concluded that the oil directly and indirectly, company was responsible for 4.7% to 5.3% of emissions of gases greenhouse humanity .
Your data began to bother. For the experts, their approach is wrong. You can not blame companies for a responsibility that falls on all people. Others believe that when responsibility is everyone’s, is no one. Heede has said that most citizens simply do not have a choice. Its decisions are already determined by these industries and the economic system.
As told Starr in his report, the next task that Greenpeace commissioned him to Heede was tocalculate the emissions of companies hydrocarbons larger. In 2013 he published his results in a scientific journal and ruffled the debate on climate justice. Between 1791 and 2011, 90 companies were responsible for 63% of global emissions. Only the eight largest accounted for 20%.
A month ago, Heede was summoned to the US House of Representatives, because some of its members believe that is part of a conspiracy to affect the image of these companies. “This is a campaign to intimidate and stop scientific research,” said Heede.
