Top 100 fossil fuel companies produce nearly 1 trillion tonnes of global greenhouse gas emissions

The Carbon Majors Database: CDP Carbon Majors Report 2017 - 100 fossil fuel producers and nearly 1 trillion tonnes of greenhouse gas emissions [pdf]

All 100 fossil fuel companies in this study collectively accounted for “72% of global industrial GHG emissions”.

Coincidentally the fossil fuel and mining sectors are some of the most heavily government-subsidised sectors globally - as well as featuring prominantly in lists of multinational corporations paying little or no tax in the countries in which they operate.

Top 50 fossil fuel companies accounting for half of total global industrial GHG Emissions in 2015

Saudi Arabian Oil (Aramco)

Gazprom

National Iranian Oil

Coal India

Shenhua Group

Rosneft OAO

China National Petroleum Corp CNPC

ADNOC

ExxonMobil Corp

Petroleos Mexicanos (Pemex)

Royal Dutch Shell PLC

Sonatrach SPA

Kuwait Petroleum Corp

BP PLC

Qatar Petroleum Corp

Petroleos de Venezuela SA (PDVSA)

Peabody Energy Corp

Iraq National Oil Co

Petroleo Brasileiro SA (Petrobras)

Chevron Corp

Datong Coal Mine

Lukoil OAO

China National Coal

Petroliam Nasional Berhad (Petronas)

Nigerian National Petroleum Corp

Shanxi Coking Coal Group Co Ltd

BHP Billiton Ltd

Shandong Energy

Total SA

Glencore PLC

Shaanxi Coal Chemical Industry Group Co Ltd

Poland Coal

Yankuang

Statoil ASA

Arch Coal Inc

Eni SPA

ConocoPhillips

SUEK

Kazakhstan Coal

TurkmenGaz Sasol Ltd

Anglo American

Henan Coal Chem.

Jizhong Energy

Surgutneftegas OAO

Shanxi Jincheng

Sinopec

Kailuan

Bumi

CNOOC

Shanxi Lu’an

Here are 15 of the remaining 50 highest polluting fossil fuel companies

Russia (Coal)

Abu Dhabi National Oil Co

Rio Tinto

Alpha Natural Resources Inc

PT Pertamina

National Oil Corporation of Libya

Consol Energy Inc

Ukraine Coal

RWE AG

Oil & Natural Gas Corp Ltd

Repsol SA

Anadarko Petroleum Corp

Egyptian General Petroleum Corp

Petroleum Development Oman LLC

Czech Republic Coal

Tendered exhibits about child sexual abuse in Catholic institutions investigated by Catholic Church Insurance (CCI) and the Society of St Gerard Majella published by Royal Commission

Royal Commission into Institutional Responses to Child Sexual Abuse, media release:

Exhibits published about child sexual abuse in Catholic Church institutions

10 July, 2017

The Royal Commission has published documents relating to Catholic Church Insurance (CCI) and the Society of St Gerard Majella that were tendered during the public hearing into Catholic Church authorities in Australia (Case Study 50).

The public hearing was held in Sydney in February 2017.

The CCI documents relate to investigations conducted by CCI into child sexual abuse claims to establish whether an insured Catholic Church authority had prior knowledge of an alleged perpetrator’s propensity to abuse.

The Royal Commission has published CCI documents relating to 22 alleged perpetrators.

The Society of St Gerard Majella was a Catholic religious institute founded in the 1960s. It was suppressed by the Vatican at the request of the Bishop of Parramatta in 1996, which had the effect of closing down the Society.

Please note that the documents in both exhibits (Exhibit 50-0012 and Exhibit 50-0013) contain redactions of names and identifying information that are subject to directions not to publish.

Visit Case Study 50 and go to exhibits to find the documents.

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Royal Commission Analysis of claims of child sexual abuse made with respect to Catholic Church institutions in Australia, June 2017.

Pictures that tell 1,000 words - Part Three

US President Donald Trump at the Group of Twenty (G20) Hamburg Summit in Germany, 7-8 July 2017

Alone again, naturally.

And Australian federal politicians wonder why they are held in such low esteem

The majority of those Teflon-coated, masters of entitlement sitting in the Senate and House of Representative in Canberra wouldn’t even make the gesture……

The Sydney Morning Herald, 11 July 2017:

Fewer than a quarter of federal politicians have agreed to commit to new ethical standards devised by legendary corruption fighter Tony Fitzgerald - and there is not a single Turnbull government MP among them.

The former judge teamed up with the left-leaning Australia Institute think tank to survey every federal politician on their values as part of a plan to clean up Canberra and build momentum for a federal anti-corruption body.

The Queensland QC – who presided over the Fitzgerald Inquiry that ultimately led to the resignation of former state premier Joh Bjelke-Petersen – developed the questionnaire to test MPs about their attitudes towards accountability, integrity, nepotism, deception and the spending of public money.

But the response from MPs was underwhelming, with just 53 of the 226 signing up to the so-called "Fitzgerald Principles". Thirty-six refused to commit and 137 did not reply to repeated requests to participate.

"The refusal of a majority of politicians to commit publicly to normal standards of behaviour puts the need for an effective anti-corruption commission beyond doubt," Mr Fitzgerald said. 

"The major parties surely realise that the public wants politicians to behave honourably and that the scandals which are causing Australians to lose faith in democracy involve their members."

Thirty-eight members of the ALP agreed to the principles, including Opposition Leader Bill Shorten and shadow attorney-general Mark Dreyfus. Seven members of the Australian Greens signed up, as did all four members of the Nick Xenophon Team, two independents and One Nation's Pauline Hanson.

No Coalition MPs - who are often instructed not to take part in surveys - signed up.

The Australia Institute, 28 January 2015:

The Fitzgerald Principles are:

1. Govern for the peace, welfare and good government of the State;

2. Make all decisions and take all actions, including public appointments, in the public interest without regard to personal, party political or other immaterial considerations;

3.  Treat all people equally without permitting any person or corporation special access or influence; and

4.  Promptly and accurately inform the public of its reasons for all significant or potentially controversial decisions and actions.

The Australian Government has a Statement Of Ministerial Standards which all federal government ministers are obliged to uphold. However, currently there is no general code of conduct for all members of parliament and, it appears that most of those we elected in 2016 like the freedom to do as they please which this allows and are loathe to alter the status quo.

"Water Is Life" anti-fracking campaign hit Australia's highways on 8 July 2017

Some images from the Water Is Life anti-fracking event held along the nation's highways on Sauturday, 8 July 2017.

Well done, one and all!

*All images found on Twitter

Can't live on the wage you bring home but can't get a raise from the boss? Here's the reasons why

In 2016 an est. 3.89 million people living in New South Wales had a personal weekly income of between $0 and $644 per week, according to the Australian Bureau of Statistics.

In Tasmania an est. 1.03 million people had way less than $573 per week.

Between March Quarter 2016 and March Quarter 2017 wages growth remained at record lows.

So this should come as no surprise……

Industrial relations lawyer Josh Bornstein writing in The Sydney Morning Herald, 5 July 2017:

When Reserve Bank governor Philip Lowe recently declared a "wages crisis" following a prolonged period of low wages growth, it appears to have caught the federal government on the hop. Quick to respond to crises about border protection, terrorism and rising energy prices, this is one crisis that renders the government mute. There is no plan, no working group, or commissioning of a white paper from the Productivity Commission. Instead, the government has announced a plan to pay up to 10,000 "interns" to work in the retail industry for as little as $4 an hour. This plan will only exacerbate the wages crisis.

Phillip Lowe is not the first prominent mandarin to observe that stagnant wages threaten economic growth. A new consensus has emerged since the Global Financial Crisis that anaemic wages growth and increased income inequality is retarding economies and stoking political volatility in developed economies. Nevertheless, Lowe is the first in Australia to join the chorus. His suggested remedy – that employees need to speak up more to request higher pay – is strikingly naive, inviting the obvious question. What if the boss says "no"?

Lowe's counterpart at the Bank of England, Andy Haldane, has offered a more sophisticated analysis of the wages crisis, focused on the transformation of the labour market. Haldane recently observed that profound changes in workplaces had produced a period of "divide and conquer" that left workers less able to bargain for higher wages. "There is power in numbers. A workforce that is more easily divided than in the past may find itself more easily conquered. In other words, a world of divisible work may reduce workers' wage-bargaining power," he said.

The collapse in bargaining power for workers that Haldane has observed is reflected in the plight of Australian trade unions, which are languishing at their weakest point in their history. Only 14.5 per cent of employees belong to a trade union. In the private sector, that number sits at a shocking 10 per cent and falling. The tipping point passed long ago. Australian trade unions are fighting for their survival. That wage growth and employee share of GDP has hit record lows is no coincidence…..

The explanation for the severity of the collapse of unionisation is far more prosaic. It's our laws. Unions have been seriously weakened by 30 years of constant political and legislative attacks. The last conservative prime minister not to establish a royal commission into trade unions was Billy McMahon (1971-1972). For decades, business lobby groups have permanently and successfully campaigned for legislative change that weakens unions.

In this era, workplace laws have been changed in two key ways. First, the laws have been deregulated to encourage employers to cut wages and de-unionise their workplaces. At the same time, unions have been subjected to complex regulation that restricts their ability to access workplaces, recruit members and to bargain for better wages and conditions. The laws have allowed employers unprecedented ability to cut labour costs, outmanoeuvre employees and their unions while at the same time inveigling unions into a kind of regulatory quicksand…..

Read the full article here.

The American Resistance has many faces and this is just one of them (10)

New York Magazine, 3 July 2017:

Until late last month, former federal prosecutor Hui Chen worked in the Justice Department’s fraud section, ensuring that corporations followed federal ethics laws. She started the job in the fall 2015, but in the last six months it became impossible to conduct her duties without feeling as if she was “shuffling the deck chairs on the Titanic,” she recently wrote on LinkedIn. So she quit, and she blames the White House:

First, trying to hold companies to standards that our current administration is not living up to was creating a cognitive dissonance that I could not overcome. To sit across the table from companies and question how committed they were to ethics and compliance felt not only hypocritical, but very much like shuffling the deck chairs on the Titanic. Even as I engaged in those questioning and evaluations, on my mind were the numerous lawsuits pending against the President of the United States for everything from violations of the Constitution to conflict of interest, the ongoing investigations of potentially treasonous conducts, and the investigators and prosecutors fired for their pursuits of principles and facts. Those are conducts I would not tolerate seeing in a company, yet I worked under an administration that engaged in exactly those conduct. I wanted no more part in it.

As a compliance expert in DOJ’s fraud section, Chen essentially served as a corporate crime watchdog. She helped ensure that companies made changes to the policies that resulted in their prosecution and then monitored the effectiveness of those changes.

Little surprise, then, that the Trump’s administration lax approach to ethics rules rankled Chen. In the months after Trump’s inauguration, she began to attend protests during her lunch hour, among other subtle acts of defiance, the International Business Times notes.