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Comment by gravescale | Hacker News Reader

Such a tedious stat. Because nearly all greenhouse gas emissions are from energy, it's a measure of energy-sector corporate consolidation. If we exploded all energy companies into millions of tiny companies each with a single oil or gas well, but overall production is the same, would that change anything? If they accelerated the merging into one behemoth gigacorp, but extraction was the same, is that worse or better?

It's also completely burying the lede: the actual reported data at hand is the line still going up, and states increasingly account for the increase compared to "real" companies which are on a downturn. Which is kinda but not specifically related to exactly how many boardrooms are involved.

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It would change things. These few megacorps are super-powerful and have the ability not only to successfully change the law through lobbying, but are the reason the world is outputting so much greenhouse gases. Companies like Shell are calling oil "deep water energy" to make it more palatable while still extracting oil as cost-efficiently as possible.

> If we exploded all energy companies into millions of tiny companies each with a single oil or gas well, but overall production is the same, would that change anything?

In my mind that would be dramatically better for a ton of reasons.

More competition.

Less ability to hire huge legal teams.

Less ability to influence elections.

Less ability to influence laws and regulation.

And those things would make it easier for us to force them to cut their greenhouse emissions.

I rather like at least one aspect of this consolidation: If just a few companies dominate concrete production, that means that they can deploy carbon capture quicker than if eleventy companies had to run some n pilots each and eventually decide to scale the results to their entire fleet.

(Concrete production uses petrochemicals as chemicals, not as fuel. Well, often as fuel too, but…)

> If we exploded all energy companies into millions of tiny companies each with a single oil or gas well, but overall production is the same, would that change anything?

It could change something if we forced them to compete on how much of CO2 they emit for MWh.

Too big to fail is a terrible direction to move towards.

The main superpower that companies have is that they can die and be replaced by others doing better.

>It could change something if we forced them to compete on how much of CO2 they emit for MWh.

A carbon tax basically does this but at an economy-wide level, and allows us to play off fossil fuel companies against EV companies, rather than just playing off Shell vs BP, for instance.

The problem is that large, strong companies can force regulators to issue as many allowances as they need. When companies are smaller the competition makes this kind of lobbying harder. So the fact that global emmisions have such consolidated source is important and alarming.

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