Wednesday 27 January 2021

‘History made 🙌’

This week, Aggregate Industries claimed history has been made.

Aggregate Industries, however, was not referring to the news this week that the largest opinion poll of its kind, with a million people in 50 countries taking part, found almost two thirds of people now view climate change as a global emergency:
The highest proportions of people saying there is a climate emergency are in the UK and Italy, both at 81%.
Aggregate Industries was not referring to the report this week that global ice loss is accelerating at a record rate:

The melting of ice across the planet is accelerating at a record rate, with the melting of the Greenland and Antarctic ice sheets speeding up the fastest, research has found.
The rate of loss is now in line with the worst-case scenarios of the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change...
Aggregate Industries was not referring to that sort of history. This week, it was celebrating 🙌, looking for recognition for some 50,000 tonnes of asphalt:


The UK’s first carbon-neutral pavement scheme. That’s quite a claim. How did a scheme boasting "a 43% carbon reduction compared with conventional resurfacing methods" achieve carbon-neutrality?
In an industry first, through the company’s partnership with Circular Ecology (a non-profit organization), Aggregate Industries purchased a number of credits to offset the remaining carbon on the scheme.
It may be an asphalt industry first, but there’s been a huge rise in companies – particularly aviation – buying "carbon offsets" in an effort to balance their pollution, as the article Licence to pollute: the sham of carbon offsetting makes clear:
The reason that the aviation and other large polluting industries like offsets is that they let them appear to be addressing climate change while at the same time continuing to burn fossil fuels.
The one guaranteed thing that happens under carbon offsetting is that the carbon emissions still take place... meanwhile the offsetting may not succeed.
Lest we also forget, Aggregate Industries sells more than 5 million tonnes of asphalt each year. So one might wonder about carbon-neutrality for the other 99%.

And if Aggregate Industries has suddenly become so keen on carbon progress, what is it going to do about the 1.3 million tonnes or so of CO2 emissions that the company is responsible for each year; the CO2 that it is now so embarrassed about it has seemingly given up reporting?

Why are companies trying to wring so much green spin from so very little? This week saw another story:


BlackRock is the world’s largest asset manager. Larry Fink, BlackRock’s chief executive, said:
I believe that the pandemic has presented such an existential crisis – such a stark reminder of our fragility – that it has driven us to confront the global threat of climate change more forcefully and to consider how, like the pandemic, it will alter our lives.
No issue ranks higher than climate change on our clients’ lists of priorities.
The parent company of Aggregate Industries is LafargeHolcim – the world’s largest cement producer with annual CO2 emissions more than many countries.

At the time of writing, BlackRock owns 29,921,681 shares in LafargeHolcim, 4.86% of the company.

Despite LafargeHolcim's assurances over the years that it is taking climate change seriously, the company emitted 148 million tonnes of CO2 in 2019, still 2% up on 2017.
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