A mere 57 oil, gas, coal and cement producers are directly linked to 80% of the world’s greenhouse gas emissions since the 2016 Paris climate agreement, a study has shown.

We’ve not checked those numbers but perfectly willing to believe it, sure.

This powerful cohort of state-controlled corporations and shareholder-owned multinationals are the leading drivers of the climate crisis, according to the Carbon Majors Database, which is compiled by world-renowned researchers.

That’s bunk, even bunkum.

For the claim is that climate change is somethiing they are doing to us. If only those ghastly capitalists - and states actinfg as capitalists - were to wave their magic technological wands then the whole problem would disappear. Which is to entirely misunderstand what the problem is.

The actual problem is that we humans like being warm and toasty, enjoy travelling, being able to cook food and, in the case of cement, have some form of habitation to be warm and toasty in, in which to cook food and that place to travel to and from.

For all the claims that solar is really cheap, or that wind is, they’re not, not at all, not in the sense of being able to warm us, cook for us or transport us as and when we desire those things to be done. This is why energy prices continue to go skywards as we add more renewables to the mix.

As should also be obvious, if non-emittive forms of energy were in fact cheaper then we’d not have a climate change problem in the first place as we’d all have switched already. As that hasn’t happened then…..

The reason emissions exist, they continue, is not because 57 corporations are doing us down. It’s because 8 billion of us have a sharp eye for what produces what we desire. Therefore we buy these things.

It’s terribly human to go around insisting that the wotld’s not perfect because of them. They are doing this to us but it’s no more true about fossil fuel companies than it ever has been about the Rosicrucians, Trilateral Commission or the Illuminati. It us and our desires - toasty habitations and toasted food - causing the problem. So, it’s us that has to do something about it rather than piling the blame and the responsibility for action onto the capitalist scapegoats.