The Wretched of Palestine: Frantz Fanon Diagnosed the Pathology of Colonialism and Urged Revolutionary Humanism Chicago (Special to Informed Comment; Feature) – “The colonized took up arms not only because they were dying of hunger and witnessing the disintegration of their society,” wrote the Frantz Fanon in his incendiary book The Wretched of the Earth. “But also because the colonist treated them like animals and considered them brutes. As soon […] |
Chicago (Special to Informed Comment; Feature) – “The colonized took up arms not only because they were dying of hunger and witnessing the disintegration of their society,” wrote the Frantz Fanon in his incendiary book The Wretched of the Earth. “But also because the colonist treated them like animals and considered them brutes. As soon as they are born, it is obvious to them that their cramped world can only be challenged by out and out violence.” The name Frantz Fanon has become inseparable from both the horrors of colonialization and the history of liberation movements. He inspired generations of militants to fight colonialism. Since the 1961 publication of The Wretched of the Earth, which has been called the “Bible of Decolonialization,” Fanon — the Black West Indian psychiatrist who fought for Algerian independence — has been idealized by activists in the global south and beyond. For them, Frantz Fanon is the uncompromising prophet of revolution. In The Wretched of the Earth’s infamous first chapter “On Violence,” Fanon described colonialism as a pathological system — the complete imposition of violence by the settler on the natives, who are given a “colonial identity,” ”reduced to the state of an animal,” and thereby dehumanized. The colonist uses a “language of pure violence” and “derives his validity from the imposition of violence.” The colonial system, Fanon emphasized, was itself founded on “genocidal acts of dispossession and repression.” Since Hamas‘s brutal October 7 attack, Fanon has been frequently invoked, seeming more popular than ever. Quoted in essays and social media posts, Fanon’s provocative ideas have been used by supporters of Palestine to contextualize or justify Hamas’s horrific assault as well as to castigate Israel’s colonial subjugation and genocidal obliteration of Gaza and its people. The Israeli bombardment has slaughtered more than 33,000 Palestinians with uncounted more buried under the rubble and has wounded over 75,000 people while starving the surviving population. The ongoing calamity for Palestinians is not limited to the besieged Gaza Strip — it also afflicts those in the occupied West Bank, which has been all but shut down since October 7. Road closures, checkpoints, and the increased risk of military and settler violence have kept West Bank Palestinians restricted to their towns and villages. As Israeli soldiers carried out a mission of dispossession, U.N. data showed that 2023 had been an especially deadly year for Palestinians, with Israeli forces killing more of them — 499 — than in any other non-conflict year since 2005. According to Hamas‘s leaders, this provided motivation for their attack. The pure violence of the Israeli Occupation has never been more clear. “Colonialism is not a thinking machine,” wrote Fanon. “It is violence in its natural state, and it will only yield when confronted with greater violence.” The way out of colonial oppression and the colonized person’s “inferiority complex and his despairing attitude,” is through the “cleansing force” of violence. Fanon believed that violent resistance would restore the humanity of the colonized, elevate them psychologically to a position of equality, and deliver social justice: “The native discovers that his life, his breath, his beating heart are the same as those of the settler. He finds out that the settler’s skin is not of any more value than a native’s skin.” Fanon’s concepts have become integral to the rationalization of Hamas‘s terrorism. On X, TikTok, and Instagram, Fanon quotes proliferated after October 7: “Decolonization is quite simply the replacing of a certain ‘species’ of men by another ‘species’ of men” and “Decolonization is an inherently violent phenomenon” among many others.
An article in the Middle East Eye declared, “Don’t ask Palestinians to condemn Hamas – they are already condemned to live in hell on Earth” and concluded “those bearing the brunt of the onslaught today aren’t caught up in the semantic trap of condemnation. For Palestinians in Gaza and beyond, for the wretched of our shared earth, as for Fanon, ‘to fight is the only solution.’” In a statement titled “Oppression Breeds Resistance,” Columbia University students began by mourning “the tragic losses experienced by both Palestinians and Israelis” but concluded with a Fanon quote: “When we revolt it’s not for a particular culture. We revolt simply because, for many reasons, we can no longer breathe.” Many of Fanon‘s contemporary admirers have apparently not read past the first chapter of The Wretched of the Earth; or, they have ignored the final chapter “Colonial Wars and Mental Disorders” — a series of disturbing case studies that depict the debilitating and long-lasting effects of violence. By regurgitating his provocative phrases alone, Fanon’s devotees portray this complex and challenging thinker as nothing more than a sloganeer of political violence. In a timely new biography — The Rebel’s Clinic: The Revolutionary Lives of Frantz Fanon — author Adam Shatz, an editor at the London Review of Books, rescues Fanon from reduction while still agreeing that he wrote “some of the most memorable catchphrases of the liberation struggle.” The Rebel’s Clinic elaborates the drama and contradictions in Fanon’s life story and political writings, striving to explain why he is such a compelling figure more than 60 years after his death. Significantly, Shatz points out that Fanon’s “practice as a healer” who pledged to do no harm contradicted his practice as a revolutionary, who advocated violence which is harmful to both the victim and perpetrator. As a psychiatrist, Fanon believed that the violent struggle of the colonized for liberation was a kind of shock treatment that would “restore confidence to the colonized mind” and “overcome the paralyzing sense of hopelessness induced by colonial subjugation,” but “was only a first step toward the birth of a new humanity.” The Rebel’s Clinic provides a comprehensive perspective on Fanon — one that social media slogans cannot suggest. As for Fanon’s advocacy of violence, Shatz calls it “alarming” at one point but emphasizes the humanist side of Fanon — “a dashing and sophisticated intellectual who earned the admiration of Jean-Paul Sartre and Simone de Beauvoir.” Though Fanon would eventually identify with the powerless, he was a child of empire — born into a middle-class family on the island of Martinique, a French colony. A fervent French patriot, Fanon eagerly joined the Free French Army. He fought against the Nazis in North Africa and Europe, even sustaining a shrapnel injury. Experiencing racism in the Army, his relationship to France and his own racial identity underwent a radical change – from French patriot who fought for empire to Black West Indian who rebelled against it. His first book Black Skin White Masks, published in 1952, diagnosed the pathological symptoms of racism in everyday life. After completing his studies, Fanon directed a psychiatric hospital in colonial Algeria, where he discerned the many ways that French colonialism itself was the main cause of his patients’ psychological ailments. Algerians — like Palestinians today — were violently uprooted, their lands were confiscated, while their culture, language, and religion were denigrated. These experiences of dispossession, violence and alienation constituted a profound psychological trauma. Mental illness could never be divorced from racist social conditions, writes Shatz, so Fanon “approached psychiatry as if it were an extension of politics by other means.” He turned against French colonialism, joined the revolt orchestrated by the National Liberation Front (FLN) in 1954, and fought for Algerian independence. Subversively, Fanon used the hospital as a hideout for anti-French fighters as well as a treatment center for all walks of colonial Algeria, including FLN militants who had been tortured by French forces. The Martiniquais philosopher later incorporated his insights and experiences as a psychiatrist and a revolutionary into what would be his final book. The Wretched of the Earth was published in 1961 as Fanon, 36, lay perishing from leukemia in a Maryland hospital in the heart of the American empire he despised as “the country of lynchers.” He would never see a free Algeria, dying three months shy of its liberation in March, 1962. The Wretched of the Earth was the culmination of his thinking about anti-colonial revolution and, writes Shatz, “one of the great manifestos of the modern age.” The Wretched of the Earth spread across the planet within a few years of its appearance transforming Fanon into a hero among leftwing and developing-world revolutionaries and inspiring radicals in the national liberation movements of the 1960s and 1970s. It was translated widely — Che Guevara commissioned a Cuban version — and “cited worshipfully by the Black Panthers.” Huey Newton, for example, spoke of Black people as an occupied colony in imperialist America whose only option was revolutionary violence. According to Shatz, Fanon’s book helped galvanize the Black Consciousness movement in South Africa, Latin American guerrillas, the Palestine Liberation Organization, the Islamic revolutionaries of Iran, Black Lives Matter activists, and “not least the Palestinian fedayeen in training camps in Jordan, Lebanon, and Syria.” Helping to propel the book’s proliferation, especially in the West, was Gillo Pontecorvo’s 1966 movie The Battle of Algiers. Though not an adaptation, The Battle of Algiers functioned as a filmic depiction of The Wretched of the Earth. A strikingly realistic, politically radical film that sympathized with the revolutionaries, The Battle of Algiers reconstructs the oppressive colonial social conditions, the French brutality in response to anti-colonial demonstrations, the FLN attacks on French policemen, the torture of Algerian civilians, and the terror bombings that marked the four-year insurgency in the streets of Algiers leading to independence. Summoning Fanon in support of Hamas implies that the war in Gaza is the battle of Algiers of our time. However, the Gaza catastrophe is less a reenactment of The Battle of Algiers, more Hotel Rwanda or Apocalypse Now. Israel cannot extinguish Palestinian resistance through indiscriminate violence any more than Palestine can win an Algerian-style war of liberation. “Palestine today is not Algeria in 1956,” notes Al Jazeera, “which was Fanon’s most important reference point. There will be no long-fought war of independence resulting in the vast majority of Jews” being evicted “from a reconquered Palestine.” Further, the outcome in Algeria does not provide a model for a free and democratic Palestine. In The Wretched of the Earth, Fanon stressed that mere violence as an end in itself, disconnected from any wider achievable political and social goal, would only reproduce the power relations of the colonizer. He suggested that liberation movements can become new oppressors once they attain power, thus exchanging one barbarism for another. Though Fanon did not live to see it, Algeria descended into one-party rule built on state terror and religious fanaticism. Fanon’s warnings about the obstacles to post-colonial freedom: corruption, autocratic rule, religious zealotry, the enduring wounds of colonial violence, and the persistence of underdevelopment and hunger came to pass and still haunt liberation movements today. “The militant who confronts the colonialist war machine with his rudimentary resources realizes that while he is demolishing colonial oppression he is indirectly building up yet another system of exploitation,” wrote Fanon. “Such a discovery is galling, painful, and sickening. It was once all so simple with the bad on the one side and the good on the other. The people discover that the iniquitous phenomenon of exploitation can assume a Black or Arab face.” In a passage that none of his latter-day followers have cited, Fanon warned that “racism, hatred, resentment, and the legitimate desire for revenge alone cannot nurture a war of liberation — one does not endure massive repression or witness the disappearance of one’s entire family in order for hatred or racism to triumph.” Fanon — the authentic revolutionary — shows himself more doubtful of violent resolutions than his less courageous social media acolytes, who indulge in easy revolutionary talk from positions of comfort. The social media application of The Wretched of the Earth to Palestine eliminates the aspirational aspects of his anti-colonial prescription. Fanon’s advocacy of anti-colonial violence cannot be separated from his belief in a revolutionary humanism, emancipated from colonialism and empire. He wrote that the overthrow of the colonial oppressors will inevitably lead to a “new humanism written into the objectives and methods of the struggle.” Fanon asserted that a violent uprising by the native people would be the first step in a transformative process that would lead to a postcolonial society based on universalist ideas of freedom and equality for all — a society that might very well include the former colonizers. Palestine, however, is a long way from this social transformation that would deliver a political solution rooted in equality, dignity and justice for both Palestinians and Israelis. The Caribbean thinker perceptively diagnosed the disease of colonialism that Israel continues to propagate as it replicates its primary pathology: the obliteration of Palestinians. As a new UN report states: “Israel’s genocide on the Palestinians in Gaza is an escalatory stage of a long-standing settler colonial process of erasure. For over seven decades this process has suffocated the Palestinian people as a group – demographically, culturally, economically and politically – seeking to displace it and expropriate and control its land and resources.” Fanon, the psychiatrist, did not enunciate a enduring cure for this vengeful colonial pathology. Surprisingly, Fanon concluded The Wretched of the Earth in the same place as John Lennon in his utopian song Imagine, which conceives of “no wars and a brotherhood of man.” Fanon ended The Wretched of the Earth with an idealistic challenge to imagine a new world: “For humanity, comrades, we must make a new start, develop a new way of thinking, and endeavor to create a new man.” But Fanon did not clarify how we would arrive at this new, more equitable reality. Despite this apparent disconnect, we read Fanon today for his startlingly prescient analysis of contemporary ills: the enduring trauma of racism, the persistent plague of white supremacy and xenophobia, the scourge of authoritarianism, and the savagery of colonial domination. Poetic, enraged, and insubordinate, Frantz Fanon gave voice to the anguish of the colonized voiceless and his words continue to resonate with a new global “wretched of the earth.” The Peril of Forgetting Guantánamo  ( Tomdispatch.com ) – Last weekend my father, Larry Greenberg, passed away at the age of 93. Several days later, I received an email from the French film director Phillippe Diaz who sent me a link to his soon-to-be-released I am Gitmo, a feature movie about the now-infamous Guantánamo Bay detention facility. As I was […] |
( Tomdispatch.com ) – Last weekend my father, Larry Greenberg, passed away at the age of 93. Several days later, I received an email from the French film director Phillippe Diaz who sent me a link to his soon-to-be-released I am Gitmo, a feature movie about the now-infamous Guantánamo Bay detention facility. As I was soon to discover, those two disparate events in my life spoke to one another with cosmic overtones. Mind you, I’ve been covering Guantánamo since President George W. Bush and his team, having responded to the 9/11 attacks by launching their disastrous “Global War on Terror,” set up that offshore prison to house people American forces had captured. Previewing Diaz’s movie, I was surprised at how it unnerved me. After so many years of exposure to the grim realities of that prison, somehow his film touched me anew. There were moments that made me sob, moments when I turned down the sound so as not to hear more anguished cries of pain from detainees being tortured, and moments that made me curious about the identities of the people in the film. Although the names of certain officials are mentioned, the central characters are the detainees and individual interrogators, as well as defense attorneys and guards, all of whom interacted at Guantánamo’s prison camp over the course of its two-plus decades of existence. While viewing it, I was reminded of a question that Tom Engelhardt, founder and editor of TomDispatch, has frequently asked me: “What is it about Guantánamo that’s so captivated you over the years?” Why is it, he wanted to know, that year after year, as its story of injustice unfolded in a never-ending cycle of trials that failed to start, prisoners cleared for release but still held in captivity, and successive administrations whose officials simply shrugged in defeat when it came to closing the nightmarish institution, it continues to haunt me so? “Would you be willing,” he asked, “to reflect on that for TomDispatch?” As it turned out, the death of my dad somehow helped me grasp a way to answer that question with previously unattainable clarity. The Missing Outrage As a start, in response to his question, let me say that, despite my own continued immersion in news about the prison camp, I’m struck that, in the American mainstream, there hasn’t been more headline-making outrage over the never-ending reality of what came to be known as Gitmo. From the moment it began in January 2002 and a photo appeared of shackled men bent over in the dirt beside the open-air cages that would hold them, wearing distinctive orange jumpsuits, its horrid destiny should have been apparent. The Pentagon Public Affairs Office published that immediately iconic image with the hope, according to spokesperson Torie Clarke, that it would “allay some of our critics” (who were already accusing the U.S. of operating outside of the Geneva Conventions). Rather than allay them, it caught the path of cruelty and lawlessness on which the United States would continue for so many endless years. In April 2004, the world would see images of prisoners in American custody at Abu Ghraib prison in Iraq, naked, hooded, cuffed, sexually humiliated, and abused. Later reports would reveal the existence of what came to be known as “black sites,” operated by the CIA, in countries around the world, where detainees were tortured using what officials of the Bush administration called “enhanced interrogation techniques.”  For 22 years now, through four different administrations, that prison camp in Cuba, distinctly offshore of any conception of American justice, has held individuals captured in the war on terror in a way that defies any imaginable principles of due process, human rights, or the rule of law. Of the nearly 780 prisoners kept there, only 18 were ever actually charged with a crime and of the eight military court convictions, four were overturned while two remain on appeal. A large number of those captured were originally sold to the Americans for bounty or simply picked up randomly in places in countries like Afghanistan known to be inhabited by terrorists and so assumed, with little or no hard evidence, to be terrorists themselves. They were then, of course, denied access to lawyers. And as I was reminded recently on a trip to England where I met with a couple of released detainees, those who survived Gitmo still suffer, physically and psychologically, from their treatment at American hands. Nor have they found justice or any remedy for the lasting harms caused by their captivity. And while the post-9/11 war on terror moment has largely faded into the past (though the American military is still fighting it in distant lands), that prison camp has yet to be shut down. A Generation Comes of Age A second and more timely answer right now to Tom Engelhardt’s question is that my unwavering revulsion to the existence of Guantánamo has stemmed from a worldview that distinctly marked my father and many in his generation — men and women who came of age in the 1940s and early 1950s, whose first moments of adulthood coincided with the postwar emergence of the United States as a global superpower that touted itself as a guardian of civil rights, human rights, and justice. The opposition to fascism in World War II, the support for international covenants protecting civilians, a growing commitment at home to civil liberties and civil rights – those were their ideological guideposts. And despite the contradictions, the hypocrisy, and the failure that lurked just behind the foundational tenets of that belief system, many like my father continued to have faith in the honorable destiny of the United States whose institutions were robust and its motives honorable. To be sure, there was deep denial involved in his generation’s sugar-coated version of the American experience. The revelation of the Phoenix Program in Vietnam; decisions to overthrow elected governments in Guatemala, Iran, and elsewhere; the profound and systemic domestic racism of the country as described in Michelle Alexander’s The New Jim Crow; even the dirty dealings of the Nixon White House during Watergate; and, in this century, the official lying that set the stage for the disastrous Iraq War all should have dampened their rose-colored assessment of American democracy. Still, in so many ways he and many of his compatriots held fast to their belief in the power of this country to eternally return to its best self. True to his belief in the American dream, my father took me to see movies and plays at our local college that amplified a worldview that he, like so many of his generation, embodied. I was often the youngest attendee at those films with stars like Spencer Tracy in Inherit the Wind, an ode to free speech; Gregory Peck in To Kill a Mockingbird, with its portrayal of the evils of racism; and Henry Fonda in Twelve Angry Men, whose message doubled down on the tenet that the accused are always innocent until proven guilty. And let’s not forget Judgement at Nuremberg, the dramatization of the post-World War Two war crimes tribunals, led by U.S. Supreme Court Justice Robert Jackson, a series of trials in which Nazi leaders were convicted of committing genocide. Those films, crying out for fairness, equality, and an end to racism, gave voice to champions of democracy, and energy to my father’s generation’s firm embrace of American possibilities. Memory and Forgetting A third answer, also underscored by my recent personal encounter with life’s fleetingness, is my growing fear, as an historian, that Guantánamo will simply be forgotten. In a sense, in the world of Donald Trump, collapsing bridges, and blazing wars in distant lands, it already seems largely forgotten. Although 22 years later it’s still home to 30 detainees from the war on terror, Guantánamo attracts little attention these days. If it weren’t for the invaluable work of Carol Rosenberg at the New York Times, who has reported on Gitmo since Day One in January 2002, as well as a handful of other dedicated reporters including John Ryan at Lawdragon, few could know anything about what’s going on there now. As sociology professor Lisa Hajjar points out, “Media coverage at Guantánamo has become a rarity.” While the press pool for the hearings of the military commissions that are still ongoing there averaged about 30 reporters until perhaps 2013, it’s now been whittled down to, at most, “about four per trip,” according to Hajjar. Gitmo media coverage (and so public attention) has essentially disappeared — hardly a surprise given the current globally crushing issues of war and deprivation, injustice and extralegal policies, not to speak of the mad discomfort of election 2024 here in America. Guantánamo, whose last inmate arrived in 2008 and whose viable path to closure has remained blocked year after year (no matter that three presidents — George W. Bush, Barack Obama, and Joe Biden — each declared his desire to shut it down), persists, its deviations from the law unresolved. As it happens, flagging interest in Guantánamo has coincided with an eerie larger cultural phenomenon — a turn away from history and memory. In the world of social media and the immediate moment, a malady of forgetfulness about past events should be a cause of concern. In fact, Mother Jones Washington bureau chief David Corn recently published a striking piece on the phenomena. Citing an Atlantic article by psychiatrists George Makari and Richard Friedman, Corn noted that, while forgetting can help people get on with their lives after a traumatic experience, it can also prevent trauma survivors from learning the lessons of the past. Rather than confront the impact of what’s occurred, it’s become all too common to simply brush it all under the rug, which, of course, has its own grim consequences. “As clinical psychiatrists,” they write, “we see the effects of such emotional turmoil every day, and we know that when it’s not properly processed, it can result in a general sense of unhappiness and anger — exactly the negative emotional state that might lead a nation to misperceive its fortunes.” In other words, events like the 9/11 attacks and what followed from them, the Covid pandemic, or even the events of January 6, 2021, as Corn’s psychiatrists point out, can bring such pain that forgetting becomes “useful,” even at times seemingly “healthful.” Not surprisingly, an increasing forgetfulness about traumatic events is echoed on an even broader scale in a contemporary trend toward the abandonment of history, presumably in favor of the present and its megaphone, the social media universe. As historian Daniel Bessner has pointed out, this country is now undergoing a profound reconsideration of the very purpose and importance of the historical record. Across the country, universities are reducing the size of their history faculties, while the number of undergraduates majoring in history and related fields in 2018-2019 had already declined by more than a third since 2012. No wonder Guantánamo has been relegated to the past, a distant chapter in the ever-diminishing war on terror and no matter that it continues to function in the present moment. For example, two death penalty cases are currently in pretrial hearings there. One involves the October 2000 bombing of the USS Cole, a Navy destroyer, which resulted in the deaths of 17 American sailors. As the intrepid Carol Rosenberg points out, the case has been in pretrial hearings since 2011. The other involves four defendants accused of conspiring in the attacks of September 11th. A fifth defendant, Ramzi bin al Shibh, was recently removed from the case, having been found incompetent to stand trial due to the post-traumatic stress disorder that resulted from his torture at American hands. As for the remaining defendants, originally charged in 2008 and then again in 2011, no trial date has yet been set. The ever-elusive timetable for those prosecutions tells you everything. Evidence tainted by torture has made such a trial impossible. The Cycles of American History It’s hard to fathom how my father’s generation, stubbornly rose-colored in their vision of the country, swallowed the blatant failures of the post-9/11 years. My sense is that many of them, like my dad, just shook their heads, certain that the true spirit of American democracy would ultimately prevail and the wrongs of indefinite detention, torture, and judicial incapacity would be righted. Still, as the country spiraled into January 6th and its aftermath, the reality of America’s lost grip on its own promises of justice, morality, lawfulness, and accountability actually began to sink in. At least it did with my dad, who expressed clear and present fears of a country succumbing to the specter of his childhood, fascism, the very antithesis of the America he aspired to. Philippe Diaz’s film about Gitmo (which I encourage readers to catch when it premieres at the end of April) should remind at least a few of us of the importance of living up to the image of the country my father and others in his generation embraced. Isn’t it finally time to highlight the grave mistake of Guantánamo? Isn’t it finally time to close that shameful prison, distinctly offshore of American justice, and reckon with its wrongs, rather than letting it disappear into the haze of forgotten history, its momentous violations unresolved. In 2005, in his confirmation hearings for attorney general, George W. Bush’s longtime legal counsel Alberto Gonzales maintained that the ideals and laws codified in the Geneva Conventions were “quaint and obsolete.” That phrase, consigning notions of justice and accountability to the dustbin of history, encapsulated this country’s post-9/11 strategy of evading the law in the name of “security.” And as long as Guantánamo remains open, that strategy remains in place. Wouldn’t it be nice if, rather than letting Gonzalez etch in stone an epitaph for the ideals my father and his generation so revered, we could find hope in a future where their trust in the rule of law and in a government of responsible citizens who put country above personal fortune, law above fear, and peace above war might prevail? As we lay my dad’s generation to rest, shouldn’t we take some consolation in the possibility that their spirit may still help us find our way out of today’s distinctly disturbing and unnerving times? Copyright 2024 Karen J. Greenberg Via Tomdispatch.com About the Author
 By Matthew Carl Ives, University of Oxford; Belinda Wade, The University of Queensland; and Saphira Rekker, The University of Queensland | – Just 57 companies and nation states were responsible for generating 80% of the world’s CO₂ emissions from fossil fuels and cement over the last seven years, according to a new report released by […] |
By Matthew Carl Ives, University of Oxford; Belinda Wade, The University of Queensland; and Saphira Rekker, The University of Queensland | –
Just 57 companies and nation states were responsible for generating 80% of the world’s CO₂ emissions from fossil fuels and cement over the last seven years, according to a new report released by the thinktank InfluenceMap. This finding suggests that net zero targets set by the Paris climate change agreement in 2015 are yet to make a significant impact on fossil fuel production.
The report uses the Carbon Majors database, established in 2013 by Richard Heede of the Climate Accountability Institute, to provide fossil fuel production data from 122 of the world’s largest oil, gas, coal and cement producers.
The InfluenceMap report tells a sobering but informative story of the state of production in these high-emitting industries. Cement and fossil fuel production has reached unprecedented levels, with most of the emission growth traceable to a relatively small number of large companies.
The troubling reality is that the lack of progress of these large fossil fuel companies means the world will need to undertake ever more stringent and steep decarbonisation trajectories if countries are to meet the Paris agreement goal of keeping warming well below 2°C.
The Carbon Majors database highlights how critical it is for companies and countries to be held accountable for their lack of progress on emission reductions. Companies need to define exactly how best to align with the Paris goals, and then monitor and track their progress.
To address this need, our team of researchers from the Universities of Queensland, Oxford and Princeton developed a framework that outlines strict science-based requirements for tracking the progress of companies against Paris-aligned pathways.
By applying this framework to the Carbon Majors database in a follow-up study, our team mapped production budgets for 142 fossil fuel companies against several Paris-aligned global scenarios of the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change.
“Surreal Oil Rigs,” Digital, Dall-E, 2024.
We considered the “middle-of-the-road” future scenario whereby business carries on as usual – this is commonly used by investors to evaluate a company’s climate risks. With this scenario, we found that between 2014 and 2020, the coal, oil and gas companies produced 64%, 63% and 70% respectively more than their budgets allow. Further details can be found on the Are You Paris Compliant? website.
Transparency is crucial
Over the seven-year period covered by the InfluenceMap report, nation states and state-owned companies are responsible for most of this growth. It is not yet clear whether such government-run companies will move towards improved reporting against climate standards, but further interventions by governments will clearly be required to meet stated national emission-reduction goals.
Fortunately, more transparency will be available for investor-owned companies. In 2023, a non-profit that aims to standardise global accounting, the International Financial Reporting Standards Foundation, released new climate-related disclosure standards. These should provide investors, politicians and the public with access to more transparent and consistent data, making it much easier for them to accurately judge companies’ climate performance – or lack thereof.
It will be interesting to read the climate reporting of the 57 companies identified by InfluenceMap in coming years. The release of the Carbon Majors data, along with the new climate-related disclosure standards, will hopefully make a huge difference. Companies being more accountable for their emissions should help reduce greenwashing in corporate sustainability reports.
Quantifying fossil fuel and cement production, and associated emissions, is a crucial step. But companies also need to act. Achieving net zero by reducing the emissions of a relatively small number of companies will be much easier than persuading 8 billion people to take collective action on climate.
Such drastic reductions in fossil fuel production must also be matched by investment in abundant and increasingly cheap sources of clean renewable energy. Without these steps, the Paris goals will be unachievable – and that’s very risky for all of us.
Matthew Carl Ives, Senior Researcher in Economics, University of Oxford; Belinda Wade, Industry Professor, School of Business, The University of Queensland, and Saphira Rekker, Senior Lecturer in Sustainable Finance, The University of Queensland
This article is republished from The Conversation under a Creative Commons license. Read the original article.
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