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Opinion | It's Time to Acknowledge the Endless Growth Model Under Capitalism Is Unsustainable

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"The planet is running out of resources, and humanity is living beyond its means."

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A summary of the 30 articles of the Universal Declaration of Human Rights

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The Universal Declaration of Human Rights (abbreviated)

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Article 1 Right to Equality Article 2 Freedom from Discrimination Article 3 Right to Life, Liberty, Personal Security Article 4 Freedom from Slavery Article 5 Freedom from Torture and Degrading Treatment Article 6 Right to Recognition as a Person before the Law Article 7 Right to Equality before the Law Article 8 Right to Remedy by Competent Tribunal Article 9 Freedom from Arbitrary Arrest and Exile Article 10 Right to Fair Public Hearing Article 11 Right to be Considered Innocent until Proven Guilty Article 12 Freedom from Interference with Privacy, Family, Home and Correspondence Article 13 Right to Free Movement in and out of the Country Article 14 Right to Asylum in other Countries from Persecution Article 15 Right to a Nationality and the Freedom to Change It Article 16 Right to Marriage and Family Article 17 Right to Own Property Article 18 Freedom of Belief and Religion Article 19 Freedom of Opinion and Information Article 20 Right of Peaceful Assembly and Association Article 21 Right to Participate in Government and in Free Elections Article 22 Right to Social Security Article 23 Right to Desirable Work and to Join Trade Unions Article 24 Right to Rest and Leisure Article 25 Right to Adequate Living Standard Article 26 Right to Education Article 27 Right to Participate in the Cultural Life of Community Article 28 Right to a Social Order that Articulates this Document Article 29 Community Duties Essential to Free and Full Development Article 30 Freedom from State or Personal Interference in the above Rights

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Image Credit: ABACA/PA Images

Speeches. Heads of state, luminaries, power figures - they give them every day. And mostly, they don't count. They're just...part of the job, statements, announcements, bureaucracy. But some speeches are different. Some mark changes. Some rally societies. And some? Some go down in history - even if, at the moment, nobody quite knows it yet.

Such a thing recently occurred - and you might not have even heard about it. The most crucial speech by a head of state in the 21st century so far. First let me quote from the speech - so as to blind any preconceptions you might have - and then we'll discuss exactly who gave it and why it matters.

What we are currently living through is a kind of major tipping point or a great upheaval ... we are living the end of what could have seemed an era of abundance ... the end of the abundance of products of technologies that seemed always available ... the end of the abundance of land and materials including water.

We are living at the end of what could appear to be [an age] of abundance, of endless cash flow, for which we must now face the consequences in terms of state finances, of an abundance of products and technology which appeared to be perpetually available. The teleology of our world order over the last few years has demolished some things we took for granted.

It is also the end, for those that had it, of a type of insouciance. War began again in Europe six months ago to the day. For many generations in our country, war was a reality which no longer existed. At the same time, the climate crisis and all its effects are there, tangibly, and new risks are appearing all the time, like cyber attacks. We are living through a huge shift.

This overview that I'm giving, the end of abundance, the end of insouciance, the end of assumptions - it's ultimately a tipping point that we are going through that can lead our citizens to feel a lot of anxiety. Faced with this, we have a duty, duties, the first of which is to speak frankly and clearly without doom-mongering...

This leader also spoke about our societies being too "insouciant" regarding democracy's enemy's, human rights, and "the rise of illiberal regimes and strengthening of authoritarian regimes, " nothing that this is a "great turning point" that must bring about "the end of carelessness."

Did you get all that? Now. Who gave this speech? If you're European, you probably already know: Emanuel Macron. The most unlikely of figures, perhaps - because until he gave this speech, Macron was a died-in-the-wool of shareholder value neoliberal. A French President in the mold of a Washington DC technocrat. But now?

This speech matters. It's true that Macron is giving it for "political reasons" - he's a politician, QED. But to frame the subject this way? In terms described by commentators across the board as " apocalyptic"? And what is the subject, anyways?

A paradigm. This speech is speaking of a major, historic paradigm shift. It's not all the way there, quite yet - but for the leader of a rich nation, one of the world's most successful societies, to speak in such frank, brutal terms, about a mega-paradigm shifting - from abundance to scarcity, and all that entails, from economics to society to culture to social contracts to finances and beyond? It's a remarkable thing. To put it in context, in Britain, leaders are still playing the Brexit fools' game of scapegoating Europeans, while the nation falls into abject poverty, and in America, Biden's suddenly woken up, but he's not speaking remotely like this.

Macron joins a small but growing list of leaders who are converts. They're beginning to get it. Get the 21st century - and how everything is now changing, suddenly, catastrophically, irrevocably. He is precisely, exactly correct when he says that Age of Abundance is over, and the Age of Scarcity is here, something I've said almost exactly in so many words.

(Let's save the left-wing criticisms - "some people have always had it bad!!" - for the end.)

This paradigm shift is far, far greater, more historic, more ominous, and more calamitous than most of us yet realize, and most of our leaders and governments are planning for. It is a Big Deal - as big as the Industrial Revolution before it. How so?

Bought a pair of jeans recently? I was about to.I surfed on over to Weekday - my lovely wife says it's the place all the kids like these days - and had a little browse. I clicked the "details" button, and - this is interesting, because Weekday lets you see it, openly, the supplier, right down to the street address - guess where the jeans were made? Pakistan.

Pakistan - which has recently had mega-flooding. That its recently appointed Climate Change Minister, Sherry Rehman, has described as a " climate catastrophe." The death toll's already in the thousands, and the counting's barely begun. Here's what Minister Rehman had to say: "We are at the moment at the ground zero of the front line of extreme weather events, in an unrelenting cascade of heatwaves, forest fires, flash floods, multiple glacial lake outbursts, flood events and now the monster monsoon of the decade is wreaking non-stop havoc throughout the country."

What does once-in-a-millennium flooding in Pakistan have to do with you, the rich Westerner? Am I asking you to shed a tear for some poor drowned kids? You should. But mine isn't (just) a moral point. Flooding in Pakistan has everything to do with you, because you might not know it, but many of your clothes and textiles are made there.

Just like those jeans I was perusing at Weekday, Pakistan's a major, major global textile exporter. Why is that? Because it has fields upon fields of cotton, and cheap labour to boot. It's a perfect recipe for becoming a global center for everything from cotton to "cashmere," aka...Kashmir.

But now things are changing. This once-in-a-millennium flood - this monster monsoon - is likely to hit every year, maybe every two or three, if the country's lucky, because of levels of global warming so rapid they're shattering every worst forecast. And as it does, guess what? All those cotton fields and textile mills and cheap labour - they're in serious trouble. The extreme weather will cause crop failures, whether it's the unsurvivable heat or the flooding, the cheap labour will have to migrate, and the mills will have to shutter, at least many of them.

And the price of all that stuff that you didn't even know was made in Pakistan - because, well, who really looks at a label? It's going to skyrocket. That effect of course is already what's behind much of the global inflationary wave rocking the world.

And all that - my little parable - is exactly what Macron was talking about. Think about how with me - not in a judgmental way, just in a realistic one. Insouciance - who really, at least in the rich West, even looks at a label? Cares where the everyday stuff of our lives, from clothes to plastics, is made, or how, or by whom? We don't give it a second thought. We're just used to having it. Having it cheap. Having it ubiquitously. Shelves packed full of it, warehouses creaking with it, supertankers racing it all across the globe - whether the "it" is clothes or plastic stuff or electronics or what have you.

Abundance. In the West, especially, we take it for granted so much that we've barely ever stopped to think about it - except in the last year or two. It's shocking to us when the shelves aren't packed to groaning point with stuff. It's surreal to us when we can't get what we want, when we want it, for as little as possible. We've taken The Age of Abundance for granted, for most of our lives. Cold? Turn on the heat. Too hot? Flick on the AC. Hungry? Grab a snack, order some food. Bored? Do some shopping. On and on it goes, without a second thought. That's insouciance - the French way of saying a kind of lazy, entitled, almost deliberately rude indifference.

But now all that - all of it - is going to change. It already is. The Age of Abundance is very, very clearly coming to an end now. The shelves aren't always full of stuff like they used to be. Even when they are, prices are skyrocketing in ways that are shocking to behold - especially for basics, like food, energy, water. That isn't going to stop. It's only going to get worse. And we are going to have to prepare for it - just as Macron say, without doom-mongering, but being realistic about where we stand at this juncture in human history.

Just north of Pakistan - did you know Pakistan has a border with China, right where the Karakoram mountain range towers skyward- something else has been happening. China's suffered a mega-heatwave. Which has sent it into a nationwide drought. It's mightiest rivers are running dry. And because they're running dry, factories are having to close their doors.

See the link again? The End of Abundance. In this case, it's far more obvious. You might now know exactly what, but you do know that a lot of stuff in your household is made in China. And so factories in China shutting down is bad news, because prices for all these little things - thumb drives, plastic slippers, budget cutlery, what have you - are going to rise. But just as in Pakistan, it's not going to magically get better. What happened this summer in China is only going to get worse - fast.

The End of the Age of Abundance. What happens as a consequence of all the above? This is the part Macron only touched upon - because I suspect he didn't want to alarm people even more. And yet the consequences of all the above are going to be dire - unless we anticipate and invest to fight against them now.

Abundance ends. Prices rise, and keep rising. People get poorer - like in Britain, where the average household is going to end up impoverished just paying for energy, choosing between heat and food. And as they get poorer, there's less and less left over for the public purse - and so modern social contracts shatter, the public goods they guarantee decay and fall into blight, and as a consequence of that, fanaticism and fascism grow, and bang, before you know it, we're Rome.

Now. The left criticized Macron's speech - but in fact, they should be praising it. It's true, trivially so, that "some people have never had abundance!!" Duh. Tell it to the poor guy picking cotton in those Pakistani fields, in 120 degree heat. The point is that that economics - built on exploitation of the planet, each other, nature, creation - is now coming to an end, a disastrous one, because it was never built to last. The idea that we could exploit our way to infinite prosperity - at least for the 20% of the world lucky enough to powerful and wealthy - was always a kind of delusion.

Now we have to do the hard work of reinventing everything. Or step by step, scarcity will take us to places we don't want to go, the dark nightmares and abysses of history.

What does scarcity do, sudden plunges into it? It sparks everything from theocracy to fascism to authoritarianism. It triggers the panic and fear that strongmen and demagogues feed on, it ignites an atavistic craving for the security and stability of ultra hierarchical order, it sparks the search for scapegoats. Sudden plunges into scarcity are what unleashes the demons of history - and humanity.

This is where we are. Now we are asked to come to grips with the failures - not just the successes - of the industrial age. Carbon, warming, exploitation, inequality, the wars all those will spark. We are now going to have to understand, fast, that we are a civilization running out of the basics, at a planetary level, water, food, air, medicine, power - and all that flows from them.

And we are going to have to invest, now, hard, fast, if we want to enjoy those things again, at anything remotely approaching Abundance ever again. Otherwise, the future is...this. More of this. More of 2022. Just harder and faster and worse.

It's easy to be cynical. Does Macron really believe what he says? My friend - it doesn't matter. What matters is that he said what he said. Warned history and the world, in stark terms, of the stakes. The 21st century is here. But we're still living in the 20th, in the 1930s, to be precise - and if we don't change, wise up, mature, evolve, grow, we are going to find ourselves back in the 19th, and then the 15th, and right back to the Stone Age, faster than we yet imagine.

Umair
August 2022

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The End of the Age of Abundance (and the Beginning of the Age of Scarcity)

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Speeches. Heads of state, luminaries, power figures - they give them every day. And mostly, they don't count. They're just...part of the job, statements, announcements, bureaucracy. But some speeches are different. Some mark changes. Some rally societies. And some? Some go down in history - even if, at the moment, nobody quite knows it yet.

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Instead of focusing on 'micro consumerist bollocks' like ditching our plastic coffee cups, we must challenge the pursuit of wealth and level down, not up

There is a myth about human beings that withstands all evidence. It's that we always put our survival first. This is true of other species. When confronted by an impending threat, such as winter, they invest great resources into avoiding or withstanding it: migrating or hibernating, for example. Humans are a different matter.

When faced with an impending or chronic threat, such as climate or ecological breakdown, we seem to go out of our way to compromise our survival. We convince ourselves that it's not so serious, or even that it isn't happening. We double down on destruction, swapping our ordinary cars for SUVs, jetting to Oblivia on a long-haul flight, burning it all up in a final frenzy. In the back of our minds, there's a voice whispering, "If it were really so serious, someone would stop us." If we attend to these issues at all, we do so in ways that are petty, tokenistic, comically ill-matched to the scale of our predicament. It is impossible to discern, in our response to what we know, the primacy of our survival instinct.

Deforestation in Brazil's Cerrado: 'If one system crashes, it is likely to drag others down, triggering a cascade of chaos known as systemic environmental collapse.' Photograph: Reuters

Human civilisation relies on current equilibrium states. But, all over the world, crucial systems appear to be approaching their tipping points. If one system crashes, it is likely to drag others down, triggering a cascade of chaos known as systemic environmental collapse. This is what happened during previous mass extinctions.
The ocean current that brings heat from the tropics is weakening. Without it, the UK would have a climate like Siberia's
AMOC has two equilibrium states: on and off. It has been on for almost 12,000 years, following a devastating, thousand-year off state called the Younger Dryas (12,900 to 11,700 years ago), which caused a global spiral of environmental change. Everything we know and love depends on AMOC remaining in the on state.

Regardless of which complex system is being studied, there's a way of telling whether it is approaching a tipping point. Its outputs begin to flicker. The closer to its critical threshold it comes, the wilder the fluctuations. What we've seen this year is a great global flickering, as Earth systems begin to break down. The heat domes over the western seaboard of North America; the massive fires there, in Siberia and around the Mediterranean; the lethal floods in Germany, Belgium, China, Sierra Leone - these are the signals that, in climatic morse code, spell "mayday".

You might expect an intelligent species to respond to these signals swiftly and conclusively, by radically altering its relationship with the living world. But this is not how we function. Our great intelligence, our highly evolved consciousness that once took us so far, now works against us.

An analysis by the media sustainability group Albert found that "cake" was mentioned 10 times as often as "climate change" on UK TV programmes in 2020. "Scotch egg" received double the mentions of "biodiversity". "Banana bread" beat "wind power" and "solar power" put together.

I recognise that the media are not society, and that television stations have an interest in promoting banana bread and circuses. We could argue about the extent to which the media are either reflecting or generating an appetite for cake over climate. But I suspect that, of all the ways in which we might measure our progress on preventing systemic environmental collapse, the cake-to-climate ratio is the decisive index.

The current ratio reflects a determined commitment to irrelevance in the face of global catastrophe. Tune in to almost any radio station, at any time, and you can hear the frenetic distraction at work. While around the world wildfires rage, floods sweep cars from the streets and crops shrivel, you will hear a debate about whether to sit down or stand up while pulling on your socks, or a discussion about charcuterie boards for dogs. I'm not making up these examples: I stumbled across them while flicking between channels on days of climate disaster. If an asteroid were heading towards Earth, and we turned on the radio, we'd probably hear: "So the hot topic today is - what's the funniest thing that's ever happened to you while eating a kebab?" This is the way the world ends, not with a bang but with banter.
Most political news is gossip: who's in, who's out, who said what. It avoids what lies beneath: the dark money, the corruption ...
Faced with crises on an unprecedented scale, our heads are filled with insistent babble. The trivialisation of public life creates a loop: it becomes socially impossible to talk about anything else. I'm not suggesting that we should discuss only the impending catastrophe. I'm not against bants. What I'm against is nothing but bants.

It's not just on the music and entertainment channels that this deadly flippancy prevails. Most political news is nothing but court gossip: who's in, who's out, who said what to whom. It studiously avoids what lies beneath: the dark money, the corruption, the shift of power away from the democratic sphere, the gathering environmental collapse that makes a nonsense of its obsessions.

I'm sure it's not deliberate. I don't think anyone, faced with the prospect of systemic environmental collapse, is telling themselves: "Quick, let's change the subject to charcuterie boards for dogs." It works at a deeper level than this. It's a subconscious reflex that tells us more about ourselves than our conscious actions do. The chatter on the radio sounds like the distant signals from a dying star.

There are some species of caddisfly whose survival depends on breaking the surface film of the water in a river. The female pushes through it - no mean feat for such a small and delicate creature - then swims down the water column to lay her eggs on the riverbed. If she cannot puncture the surface, she cannot close the circle of life, and her progeny die with her.
Rich people can persuade themselves they've gone green because they recycle, while forgetting they have a second home
This is also the human story. If we cannot pierce the glassy surface of distraction, and engage with what lies beneath, we will not secure the survival of our children or, perhaps, our species. But we seem unable or unwilling to break the surface film. I think of this strange state as our "surface tension". It's the tension between what we know about the crisis we face, and the frivolity with which we distance ourselves from it.

A company called Soletair Power receives wide media coverage for its claim to be "fighting climate change" by catching the carbon dioxide exhaled by office workers. But its carbon-sucking unit - an environmentally costly tower of steel and electronics - extracts just 1kg of carbon dioxide every eight hours. Humanity produces, mostly by burning fossil fuels, roughly 32bn kg of CO₂ in the same period.

I don't believe our focus on microscopic solutions is accidental, even if it is unconscious. All of us are expert at using the good things we do to blot out the bad things. Rich people can persuade themselves they've gone green because they recycle, while forgetting that they have a second home (arguably the most extravagant of all their assaults on the living world, as another house has to be built to accommodate the family they've displaced). And I suspect that, in some deep, unlit recess of the mind, we assure ourselves that if our solutions are so small, the problem can't be so big.

Like Keep Britain Tidy, the Keep America Beautiful ad campaign shifted responsibility away from big corporations. Photograph: Alamy

I'm not saying the small things don't matter. I'm saying they should not matter to the exclusion of things that matter more. Every little counts. But not for very much.

Our focus on MCB aligns with the corporate agenda. The deliberate effort to stop us seeing the bigger picture began in 1953 with a campaign called Keep America Beautiful. It was founded by packaging manufacturers, motivated by the profits they could make by replacing reusable containers with disposable plastic. Above all, they wanted to sink state laws insisting that glass bottles were returned and reused. Keep America Beautiful shifted the blame for the tsunami of plastic trash the manufacturers caused on to "litter bugs", a term it invented.

The great political transition of the past 50 years, driven by corporate marketing, has been a shift from addressing our problems collectively to addressing them individually. In other words, it has turned us from citizens into consumers. It's not hard to see why we have been herded down this path. As citizens, joining together to demand political change, we are powerful. As consumers, we are almost powerless.

In his book Life and Fate, Vasily Grossman notes that, when Stalin and Hitler were in power, "one of the most astonishing human traits that came to light at this time was obedience". The instinct to obey, he observed, was stronger than the instinct to survive. Acting alone, seeing ourselves as consumers, fixating on MCB and mind-numbing trivia, even as systemic environmental collapse looms: these are forms of obedience. We would rather face civilisational death than the social embarrassment caused by raising awkward subjects, and the political trouble involved in resisting powerful forces. The obedience reflex is our greatest flaw, the kink in the human brain that threatens our lives.
The main cause of your environmental impact is your money. You persuade yourself you're a green mega-consumer, but you're just a mega-consumer
What do we see if we break the surface tension? The first thing we encounter, looming out of the depths, should scare us almost out of our wits. It's called growth. Economic growth is universally hailed as a good thing. Governments measure their success on their ability to deliver it. But think for a moment about what it means. Say we achieve the modest aim, promoted by bodies like the IMF and the World Bank, of 3% global growth a year. This means that all the economic activity you see today - and most of the environmental impacts it causes - doubles in 24 years; in other words, by 2045. Then it doubles again by 2069. Then again by 2093. It's like the Gemino curse in Harry Potter and the Deathly Hallows, which multiplies the treasure in the Lestrange vault until it threatens to crush Harry and his friends to death. All the crises we seek to avert today become twice as hard to address as global economic activity doubles, then twice again, then twice again.

Have we reached the bottom yet? By no means. The Gemino curse is just one outcome of a thing we scarcely dare mention. Just as it was once blasphemous to use the name of God, even the word appears, in polite society, to be taboo: capitalism.

One estimate suggests that, over the course of 200 years, the British extracted from India, at current prices, $45tn. They used this money to fund industrialisation at home and the colonisation of other nations, whose wealth was then looted in turn.

The looting takes place not just across geography, but also across time. The apparent health of our economies today depends on seizing natural wealth from future generations. This is what the oil companies, seeking to distract us with MCB and carbon footprints, are doing. Such theft from the future is the motor of economic growth. Capitalism, which sounds so reasonable when explained by a mainstream economist, is in ecological terms nothing but a pyramid scheme.

Is this the riverbed? No. Capitalism is just a means by which something even bigger is pursued. Wealth.
There is a poverty line below which no one should fall, and a wealth line above which no one should rise. We need wealth taxes, not carbon taxes Beyond Extinction Rebellion: the protest groups fighting on the climate frontline
Preventing more than 1.5C of global heating means that our average emissions should be no greater than two tonnes of carbon dioxide per person per year. But the richest 1% of the world's people produce an average of more than 70 tonnes. Bill Gates, according to one estimate, emits almost 7,500 tonnes of CO₂, mostly from flying in his private jets. Roman Abramovich, the same figures suggest, produces almost 34,000 tonnes, largely by running his gigantic yacht.

The multiple homes that ultra-rich people own might be fitted with solar panels, their supercars might be electric, their private planes might run on biokerosene, but these tweaks make little difference to the overall impact of their consumption. In some cases, they increase it. The switch to biofuels favoured by Bill Gates is now among the greatest causes of habitat destruction, as forests are felled to produce wood pellets and liquid fuels, and soils are trashed to make biomethane.

But more important than the direct impacts of the ultra-wealthy is the political and cultural power with which they block effective change. Their cultural power relies on a hypnotising fairytale. Capitalism persuades us that we are all temporarily embarrassed millionaires. This is why we tolerate it. In reality, some people are extremely rich because others are extremely poor: massive wealth depends on exploitation. And if we did all become millionaires, we would cook the planet in no time at all. But the fairytale of universal wealth, one day, secures our obedience.

But wealth taxes strike at the heart of the issue. They should be high enough to break the spiral of accumulation and redistribute the riches accumulated by a few. They could be used to put us on an entirely different track, one that I call " private sufficiency, public luxury ". While there is not enough ecological or even physical space on Earth for everyone to enjoy private luxury, there is enough to provide everyone with public luxury: magnificent parks, hospitals, swimming pools, art galleries, tennis courts and transport systems, playgrounds and community centres. We should each have our own small domains - private sufficiency - but when we want to spread our wings, we could do so without seizing resources from other people.

In consenting to the continued destruction of our life-support systems, we accommodate the desires of the ultra-rich and the powerful corporations they control. By remaining trapped in the surface film, absorbed in frivolity and MCB, we grant them a social licence to operate.

We will endure only if we cease to consent. The 19th-century democracy campaigners knew this, the suffragettes knew it, Gandhi knew it, Martin Luther King knew it. The environmental protesters who demand systemic change have also grasped this fundamental truth. In Fridays for Future, Green New Deal Rising, Extinction Rebellion and the other global uprisings against systemic environmental collapse, we see people, mostly young people, refusing to consent. What they understand is history's most important lesson. Our survival depends on disobedience.

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Capitalism is killing the planet - it's time to stop buying into our own destruction

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Instead of focusing on 'micro consumerist bollocks' like ditching our plastic coffee cups, we must challenge the pursuit of wealth and level down, not up There is a myth about human beings that withstands all evidence. It's that we always put our survival first. This is true of other species.

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The Guardian today reveals the 20 fossil fuel companies whose relentless exploitation of the world's oil, gas and coal reserves can be directly linked to more than one-third of all greenhouse gas emissions in the modern era.

New data from world-renowned researchers reveals how this cohort of state-owned and multinational firms are driving the climate emergency that threatens the future of humanity, and details how they have continued to expand their operations despite being aware of the industry's devastating impact on the planet.

The analysis, by Richard Heede at the Climate Accountability Institute in the US, the world's leading authority on big oil's role in the escalating climate emergency, evaluates what the global corporations have extracted from the ground, and the subsequent emissions these fossil fuels are responsible for since 1965 - the point at which experts say the environmental impact of fossil fuels was known by both industry leaders and politicians.

The top 20 companies on the list have contributed to 35% of all energy-related carbon dioxide and methane worldwide, totalling 480bn tonnes of carbon dioxide equivalent (GtCO ₂ e) since 1965.

The Guardian has collaborated with leading scientists and NGOs to expose, with exclusive data, investigations and analysis, the fossil fuel companies that are perpetuating the climate crisis - some of which have accelerated their extraction of coal, oil and gas even as the devastating impact on the planet and humanity was becoming clear.

The investigation has involved more than 20 Guardian journalists working across the world for the past six months.

The project focuses on what the companies have extracted from the ground, and the subsequent emissions they are responsible for, since 1965. The analysis, undertaken by Richard Heede at the Climate Accountability Institute, calculates how much carbon is emitted throughout the supply chain, from extraction to use by consumers. Heede said: "The fact that consumers combust the fuels to carbon dioxide, water, heat and pollutants does not absolve the fossil fuel companies from responsibility for knowingly perpetuating the carbon era and accelerating the climate crisis toward the existential threat it has now become."

One aim of the project is to move the focus of debate from individual responsibilities to power structures - so our reporters also examined the financial and lobbying structures that let fossil fuel firms keep growing, and discovered which elected politicians were voting for change.

Another aim of the project is to press governments and corporations to close the gap between ambitious long-term promises and lacklustre short-term action. The UN says the coming decade is crucial if the world is to avoid the most catastrophic consequences of global heating. Reining in our dependence on fossil fuels and dramatically accelerating the transition to renewable energy has never been more urgent.

Those identified range from investor-owned firms - household names such as Chevron, Exxon, BP and Shell - to state-owned companies including Saudi Aramco and Gazprom.

Chevron topped the list of the eight investor-owned corporations, followed closely by Exxon, BP and Shell. Together these four global businesses are behind more than 10% of the world's carbon emissions since 1965.

Twelve of the top 20 companies are state-owned and together their extractions are responsible for 20% of total emissions in the same period. The leading state-owned polluter is Saudi Aramco, which has produced 4.38% of the global total on its own.

Michael Mann, one of the world's leading climate scientists, said the findings shone a light on the role of fossil fuel companies and called on politicians at the forthcoming climate talks in Chile in December to take urgent measures to rein in their activities.

The top 20 companies have contributed 480bn tonnes of carbon dioxide equivalent since 1965

"The great tragedy of the climate crisis is that seven and a half billion people must pay the price - in the form of a degraded planet - so that a couple of dozen polluting interests can continue to make record profits. It is a great moral failing of our political system that we have allowed this to happen."

The global polluters list uses company-reported annual production of oil, natural gas, and coal and then calculates how much of the carbon and methane in the produced fuels is emitted to the atmosphere throughout the supply chain, from extraction to end use.

It found that 90% of the emissions attributed to the top 20 climate culprits was from use of their products, such as petrol, jet fuel, natural gas, and thermal coal. One-tenth came from extracting, refining, and delivering the finished fuels.

The Guardian approached the 20 companies named in the polluters list. Eight of them have replied. Some argued that they were not directly responsible for how the oil, gas or coal they extracted were used by consumers. Several disputed claims that the environmental impact of fossil fuels was known as far back as the late 1950s or that the industry collectively had worked to delay action.

Most explicitly said they accepted the climate science and some claimed to support the targets set out in the Paris agreement to reduce emissions and keep global temperature rises to 1.5C above pre-industrial levels.

All pointed out efforts they were making to invest in renewable or low carbon energy sources and said fossil fuel companies had an important role to play in addressing the climate crisis. PetroChina said it was a separate company from its predecessor, China National Petroleum, so had no influence over, or responsibility for, its historical emissions. The companies' replies can be read in full here.

The top 20 companies have contributed to 35% of all carbon dioxide and methane since 1965

The latest study builds on previous work by Heede and his team that has looked at the historical role of fossil fuel companies in the escalating climate crisis.

The impact of emissions from coal, oil and gas produced by fossil fuel companies has been huge. According to research published in 2017 by Peter Frumhoff at the Union of Concerned Scientists in the US and colleagues, CO ₂ and methane emissions from the 90 biggest industrial carbon producers were responsible for almost half the rise in global temperature and close to a third of the sea level rise between 1880 and 2010. The scientists said such work furthered the "consideration of [companies'] historical responsibilities for climate change".

Heede said: "These companies and their products are substantially responsible for the climate emergency, have collectively delayed national and global action for decades, and can no longer hide behind the smokescreen that consumers are the responsible parties.

"Oil, gas, and coal executives derail progress and offer platitudes when their vast capital, technical expertise, and moral obligation should enable rather than thwart the shift to a low-carbon future."

Heede said 1965 was chosen as the start point for this new data because recent research had revealed that by that stage the environmental impact of fossil fuels was known by industry leaders and politicians, particularly in the US.

In November 1965, the president, Lyndon Johnson, released a report authored by the Environmental Pollution Panel of the President's Science Advisory Committee, which set out the likely impact of continued fossil fuel production on global heating.

In the same year, the president of the American Petroleum Institute told its annual gathering: "One of the most important predictions of the [president's report] is that carbon dioxide is being added to the Earth's atmosphere by the burning of coal, oil and natural gas at such a rate by the year 2000 the heat balance will be so modified as possibly to cause marked changes in climate beyond local or even national efforts."

The leading state-owned polluter, Saudi Aramco, has produced 4.38% of all carbon dioxide and methane since 1965

Heede added: "Leading companies and industry associations were aware of, or wilfully ignored, the threat of climate change from continued use of their products since the late 1950s."

The research aims to hold to account those companies most responsible for carbon emissions, and shift public and political debate away from a focus just on individual responsibility. It follows a warning from the UN in 2018 that the world has just 12 years to avoid the worst consequences of runaway global heating and restrict temperature rises to 1.5C above pre-industrial levels.

The study shows that many of the worst offenders are investor-owned companies that are household names around the world and spend billions of pounds on lobbying governments and portraying themselves as environmentally responsible.

A study earlier this year found that the largest five stock-market-listed oil and gas companies spend nearly $200m each year lobbying to delay, control or block policies to tackle climate change.

Heede said the companies had a "significant moral, financial, and legal responsibility for the climate crisis, and a commensurate burden to help address the problem".

He added: "Even though global consumers from individuals to corporations are the ultimate emitters of carbon dioxide, the Climate Accountability Institute focuses its work on the fossil fuel companies that, in our view, have their collective hand on the throttle and the tiller determining the rate of carbon emissions and the shift to non-carbon fuels."

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Revealed: the 20 firms behind a third of all carbon emissions

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The Guardian today reveals the 20 fossil fuel companies whose relentless exploitation of the world's oil, gas and coal reserves can be directly linked to more than one-third of all greenhouse gas emissions in the modern era.

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