April 27, 2019decolonialatlas

Names and Locations of the Top 100 People Killing the Planet

Names and Locations
Names and Location of the Top 100 People Killing the Planet, 2019 – by Jordan Engel

“The earth is not dying, it is being killed, and those who are killing it have names and addresses.” – Utah Phillips

Just 100 companies are responsible for more than 70% of the world’s greenhouse gas emissions since 1988. The guys who run those companies – and they are mostly guys – have gotten rich on the backs of literally all life on Earth. Their business model relies on the destruction of the only home humanity has ever known. Meanwhile, we misdirect our outrage at our neighbors, friends, and family for using plastic straws or not recycling. If there is anyone who deserves the outrage of all 7.5 billion of us, it’s these 100 people right here. Combined, they control the majority of the world’s mineral rights – the “right” to exploit the remaining unextracted oil, gas, and coal. They need to know that we won’t leave them alone until they agree to Keep It In The Ground. Not just their companies, but them. Now it’s personal.

Houston tops this list as home to 7 of the 100 top ecocidal planet killers, followed by Jakarta, Calgary, Moscow, and Beijing. The richest person on the list is Russian oil magnate Vagit Alekperov, who is currently worth $20.7 billion.

The map is in the form of a cartogram which represents the size of countries by their cumulative carbon dioxide emissions since industrialization.

This map is a response to the pervasive myth that we can stop climate change if we just modify our personal behavior and buy more green products. Whether or not we separate our recycling, these corporations will go on trashing the planet unless we stop them. The key decision-makers at these companies have the privilege of relative anonymity, and with this map, we’re trying to pull back that veil and call them out. These guys should feel the same personal responsibility for saving the planet that we all feel.

Names and Locations North America.png
Closeup of the top 32 North Americans killing the planet.
Names and Locations Europe.png
Closeup of the top 18 Europeans killing the planet.

Update, September 2019:

Writer Adam Weymouth contacted every person on this list asking for an interview to discuss their thoughts on climate change. In the course of his research, he found a few CEOs have now changed. They are:

Suncor – CEO Mark Little;
Kiewit – CEO Bruce Grewcock;
NACCO – CEO J C Butler Jr;
Console Energy – CEO James A Brock;
Alpha Natural Resources no longer exists. Bought by Contura Energy. CEO Kevin S Crutchfield;
Polska Grupa  Górnicza – CEO Tomasz Rogala;
OKD – CEO Michal Heřman;
EGPC – CEO Abed Ezz El-Regal;
Nigerian National Petroleum – CEO Mele Kyari;
DTEK – CEO Maxim Timchenko (Rinat Akhmetov is the owner);
CNOOC – CEO Yuan Guangyu;
INPEX – CEO Takayuki Ueda;
Berau Coal Energy – CEO Iskak Indra Wahyudi;
Indika Energy – CEO Agus Lasmono

“Names and Location of the Top 100 People Killing the Planet, 2019” was made by Jordan Engel. It can be reused under the Decolonial Media License 0.1.

Sources:
2017 Carbon Majors Report
WRI Climate Analysis Indicators Tool via The Carbon Map
The Forbes List of Richest People in the World

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200 comments

  2. We need a Resistbot to easily contact these CEO’s on a regular basis to protest their actions. Who can create this?

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  4. My sense of this is that we, collectively, have the power to start undermining these people, by moving our money away from them, punishing the banks who finance their enterprises, and building our own, alternative markets.

    The problem is that the will simply is not there. We can’t even get people to recycle, how are we going to persuade them to move their bank accounts? And where to?

    I have started a Directory of Ethical Enteprise, but it is more by way of offering those already on the way to seeing the light than to realistically hope we’ll get the rest to act. So, what’s the answer? Revolution? War? Bloodshed?

    Those things have succeeded in the past, but only in changing the names on the map, and perhaps spreading the wealth around alittle, around a Communist Party or two, or another, new Elite.

    What is the answer? I don’t know, but i know what the answer NATURE has for parasitic species like ours, who kill the hsot… ALL the hosts: EXTINCTION!

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    • Individual “consumer” actions may be a lever but a weak one in any case: we have limited choices, the poorer you are the less choices you have. This requires of a true REVOLUTION, with organized action at a much more efficient and political level, but such action begins with acquisition of consciousness (contra-info) and socio-political organization (party-movement), which should serve to articulate the willpower of the collective. Without such a conscious and organized collective, nothing will change. However you don’t need to awaken and organize everyone just overnight, a conscious organized minority can be extremely powerful and, if “on the right side of history”, if coherent with what the time demands, it will quickly expand and become even more powerful. That’s the path, in this path boycott “consumer” actions have a role to play but they are almost definitely not the main aspect of the struggle, which is fundamentally political and should be expressed in more “normal” socio-political struggle such as street protests, labor strikes and parallel political expression in form of both electoral politics (where available) and decentralized organization at local level (true counter-power and seed of true democracy).

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  13. Interesting. It is certainly good to put names to exploitation and ecocidal guilt. What stroke me the most is that the man of the Ecocide in Spain is not one of the best known magnates, it is Josu Jon Imaz, the man who the censored investigative magazine Ardi Beltza (Black Sheep) described c. 1998 as “the man of the “Jewish” (Zionist) Mafia in the Basque Country”. He later directed the abortion of the feeble secessionist attempt by Ibarretxe and took full control of the Basque Nationalist Party for a while, leaving it as a mere Basque Regionalist Party, with all the corruption propped up and the political line totally submissive to Spain, the EU and NATO.

    Months after this investigation on the Zionist Mafia and their top agent in the Basque Country, Josu Jon Imaz, the magazine and its parent newspaper Egin were closed by the Spanish political court. Two decades later they were acquitted of any wrongdoing but they were anyhow utterly destroyed.

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  14. This is a great attempt to make “someone” responsible. Irresponsibility is an epidemic, as millions hide under their headphones, take a seat behind a wheel, book a flight for a glass of wine and a selfie. My Canadian privileges can’t easily be given away, but I know that Canada is a large emitter. But the deliberate efforts by Big Oil (ads in 30 Canadian publications last week) should be negated by vigorous trollers, like those hounding the Canada Green Party announcement with graceless, unhelpful stupidity. Such human waste, a whole lot of it.

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  23. Your original map was impossible to read because of the type size. Thank you for enlarging the North America and Europe maps – but where are the other maps?
    Not of much use if you can’t read it! Also, if you’re talking about Houston, Dallas, other cities people know, fine. But is that Gillette, Wyoming, you’re talking about? If so, then label it as such.

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  25. curious that a blog calling itself the “decolonial atlas” is focusing on some Russian while colonizers brutalize eastern Europe and chomp at the bit with hysterical orientalist racist propaganda about big scary Russia. Too bad Russia doesn’t make much of an actual dent on the map.

    even more curious is the truly inspired decision to name Pyongyang and the DPRK, an embattled country which has very little room to develop alternative energy sources, being as they are under horrific siege by colonizers who have already killed millions of their citizens, and want to finish the job. I’m guessing you’d prefer if Koreans starved once again so they can cut their modest CO2 levels, so modest in fact that they are comparable to fucking Switzerland. What really gives the game away is that you named Pyongyang and some random DPRK official (as if being a DPRK government official is in any way equivalent to monopoly capitalists overthrowing entire countries and killing countless hundreds of thousands, which you don’t seem in any particular rush to actually name here), while completely ignoring the fact that RoK has three times more emissions.

    If you’re not getting paid by colonizer organizations for this spin, you’re missing a paycheck. Maybe it’s time to give the Ford Foundation a call?

    PS. some real winners you have in the comments, straight off the bat you have an imperial chauvinist having a field day peddling their racist paranoia about 5G and China, yellow peril and all. May want to change your blog title, it may attract people actually knowledgeable and dedicated to decolonization, and that’ll just be embarrassing to have your spot blown up by people *really* opposing colonialism, don’t ya think?

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    • The whole idea of DOXing some people who supply the products which consumers buy is disgusting and abhorrent to me, and that is without even looking closely at who has been chosen to face the wrath of a misguided public. It looks like a miserable attempt to start a bloody revolution that will replace a bunch of business leaders with a group of people not afraid to do anything to achieve power.

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      • Consumers have no or very limited alternatives: you must survive according to the environment you find yourself in. It’s all kinds of wrong, of capitalist demagogery to blame consumers. Also capitalist and CEOs are not “producers” but *managers* and arguably *exploiters* of other people’s (workers’) and Earth’s productivity.

        In any case there must be some “order” or “planning” or “authority” that detirmines according to the public good, and in this case Earth’s ecological health needs (which are our survival needs as species and societies), how things are done, this authority should regulate one way or another, for the common good, for the greater good, if these oligarchs are allowed to destroy our planet and our health or not. Of course the answer is “not” but in any case that’s the decision the political authorities, hopefully representing the peoples as democratically as possible, must take: to rule over the selfisheness of the capitalist oligarchs for the common good.

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  26. Consider who may be behind these big companies, and the banks who support them… Who is actually controlling humanity, what we do, and what we consume? There are many theories, do your own research and come to your own conclusions. I do suggest that you research 5G – it’s international roll-out is, imo, the greatest threat humanity (and most other species) has ever faced.

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    • Gus Speth, a US advisor on climate change said:

      “I used to think that top environmental problems were biodiversity loss, ecosystem collapse and climate change. I thought that thirty years of good science could address these problems. I was wrong. The top environmental problems are selfishness, greed and apathy, and to deal with these we need a cultural and spiritual transformation. And we scientists don’t know how to do that.”

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  28. […] το 1988 και μετά. Ένα από τα τελευταία νέα όμως, είναι το άρθρο – παρουσίαση από την ιστοσελίδα «The Colonial Atlas» μιας σειράς ονομάτων μεγάλων επιχειρηματιών από […]

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  29. I don’t think that your report is not well researched:-
    1. Here in South Africa, the biggest producer of Carbon Dioxide is the state-owned utility called Eskom. Eskom is currently operating some of the world’s oldest and dirtiest coal-fired generators, and it is in the process of building more of these monsters.
    2. And then… you seem to ignore the big consumers of hydrocarbon fuels: for example, I don’t see any airlines, and I don’t see many freight companies, which operate fleets of ships and trucks.
    3. And what about the big consumers of electric power in countries where coal is used to generate electric power: for example, the smelters of Chromium, Platinum, and Aluminium.
    It’s simply too easy to name the people you have.

    Finally (and this is not research-based), why blame the CEOs? The people who profit from the big polluters are the shareholders, including some pretty large Pension Funds and other financial institutions.

    Liked by 5 people

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  30. […] το 1988 και μετά. Ένα από τα τελευταία νέα όμως, είναι το άρθρο – παρουσίαση από την ιστοσελίδα «The Colonial Atlas» μιας σειράς ονομάτων μεγάλων επιχειρηματιών από […]

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  31. […] το 1988 και μετά. Ένα από τα τελευταία νέα όμως, είναι το άρθρο – παρουσίαση από την ιστοσελίδα «The Colonial Atlas» μιας σειράς ονομάτων μεγάλων επιχειρηματιών από […]

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  34. […] Individuals aren’t even close to entirely responsible for carbon emissions in the atmosphere, but we can still do better. Here are three places of opportunity to adopt habits that will make our lives less carbon intensive. […]

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  35. Everyone on here including the author should seriously think about how these companies (mostly energy and transportation related) came into being… ask yourself about your own consumption before asking them to ‘STOP’ and not have food, clean water, electricity, that laptop you typed your comment on, and the chair you’re sitting on or the car you needed to get to work… I bet each and everyone of you commenters drink bottled water, now you go and think hard about how that got to you and take a long hard look at your own consumption. You want change? then go live on a self sustaining farm because a farm is what you will need to ‘STOP’ supporting these industries… not so practical anymore is it, if each and every person on this planet needs to farm…? the real problem is the uncontrollable population who is supporting these industries. That is what needs to ‘STOP’. Giving companies fines or taking their CEO’s to trial is a waste of time. The real change ‘STOPS’ with you.

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    • Most of us in the nordic countries don’t drink bottled water, as our tap water is of excellent quality. Some of us don’t even own cars, but instead choose to commute by bicycle or public transport. It’s not that far fetched that these conditions could be improved to the same level around the world, if for example, we redirected global military expenditure.

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    • This is pretty much textbook pro-polluting propaganda: “let us do what we want, it’s all the individual’s fault”.

      But some individuals pollute more than others – maybe they drive 30 miles each way to work everyday, own a big house, use aircon, travel a lot, own shares in an oil company, etc. The plastic bottles users are negligible compared to that, but you’re acting as if it was all the same, as if Shell oil and a guy using a water bottle were in the same league. Your point is, nobody should criticize anybody, because everybody pollutes at least a little. The persons using that argument tend to be the ones that pollute A LOT.

      Being realistic means taking action to reduce pollution by legislating against inappropriate individual behavior, and also against companies. What you’re suggesting – everybody has their own farm – is completely absurd (it’s possible to have large-scale farming in an ecologically responsible way) and is utterly unrealistic. There are three reasons why you may be suggesting it: (1) you are polluting in a way that gets you personal advantages and you want to continue, or (2) you’re paid by such a person or company, or (3) you’ve been brainwashed by these people.

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    • Actually, a lot of the commenters do not drink bottled water, use solar power, drive electric, do not produce much plastic waste, grow our own food, shop only local and second-hand…and try every means to educate friends and family to do better and be more responsible. We take our responsilities seriously, and corporations should be held responsible and pay their share. Their only purpose for being is to enrich themselves.

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  36. Helllo
    You have to modify the name of Syrian SPC Director.
    His real name is Ysaer Al Haimed
    Not Wasef as you mentioned.
    Best Regards,
    Muhammed

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  42. Please note Octavio Romero is a whole different deal. Theoretically he does not profit from the sales of PEMEX oil (doesn’t mean they can’t be crooked) PEMEX it’s a state run company and the profits go to the national coffers, not the person, PEMEX is not a private company, and the CEO does not directly profit from it. So if you have PEMEX because it is an oil company, sure, but be aware, it is one of our few steady incomes for the country

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    • The same goes for the two norwegian companies. They are state-owned and the directors are wealthy, but not very rich people. And in Norway you have no corruption so they don’t profit directly from the activities of the company. It’s just plain stupid to have them on the list.

      The majority of the companies in the middle-east are state-owned as well. But state and private ownership are a bit mixed up inte those countries so it’s a different deal.

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      • Can they change the course of their companies to begin halting resource extraction? If they have that power and are not doing so, they are responsible.

        Removal from their positions and replacement with executives determined to responsibly realign their production to non-carbon energy is the goal. It’s not blame, it’s an HR decision.

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  43. […] The Decolonial Atlas ekimeneko kideen esanetan, munduko mehatze, petrolio, gas eta ikatz uztiapenen eskubideak dituzten enpresatzar horietan, erabakimena duten gizon eta emakumeek (zehazki 99 gizon eta emakume bakarrak) anonimatoa izaten dute sarritan lagun, eta mapa honen bitartez fokupean jarri nahi dituzte, hauexek merezi omen dutelako planetan bizi garen gainontzeko 7.500 milioi biztanleon sumina, Lurra suntsitzea baitute aberastu dituen negozio. […]

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  44. OK, let us assume only 1 of this 100 persons makes clear his mind and changed his point of view. Guess, how long it would take to fire this unlucky man and then destroying his life completely. What do you think?

    If you find the answer you probably recognize that your approach is childish.

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      • AND YOUR SNARKY, RUDE COMMENT IS PART OF THE PROBLEM! Don’t purchase products such corporations produce for one thing; it takes a concerted effort from all of us working together to go after each of these gozillas piece by piece.

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    • the approach one surmises here is exposure, plain and simple. is such approach childish ? hardly. while it is true that all these contingently powerful people are to some degree (and for a variety of sometimes sinister reasons) both willing and compelled to do what is irresponsible and insane, they are vulnerable from the side of their victims as well. So, ultimately, it is truly a matter of how, in what way, and to what degree is one to organize a backlash in their direction. But, clearly, the first step is knowing from exposure. You should be thankful for the article’s writer effort in that regard !!!

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  48. Unfortunately it’s a fallacy that National Governments can do anything to set binding laws or legislation to save the planet. Due to international trade agreements, invester dispute schemes, TPP ect. our Governments can and have been sued in secret courts and are paying hundreds of millions of dollars if they enforce environmental laws. This is why good meaning politicians are having the make sour deals with international fossil fuel corporations (mostly American owned). Capitalism, particularly Neoliberalism, being use by “the elites”, is the route cause and must be dealt with.

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    • quite the contrary, the fallacy is that national governments can do nothing about it without making changes that are not more irresponsible or insane than not making them. And that’s mainly because government is made of people and laws, not capitalism, ideology, or even theoretical/practical mindset. And that is also why dialectical materialism is not only beside the point but persistently unhelpful. A materialism of ideas or of principle is always bogus, what really counts is only a materialism of decision and action !!!

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  50. So. Become an Earth Protector and ask your friends to become one also. There is no more powerful tool to protect the Earth, because when ecocide becomes a crime, corporate behaviour is forced to change. Not because CEOs become liable to prosecution (although they do and that’s an exciting prospect) but because ECOCIDAL PRACTICES BECOME ILLEGAL. They can’t be permitted by governments, underwritten by insurers or backed by investors… and so they have to stop.
    For 2 minutes and a fiver to become an Earth Protector, I’d say that’s worth a punt.
    Polly Higgins certainly thought so – she bet her whole life on it. Let’s make sure her work is not wasted.
    https://www.stopECOCIDE.earth

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    • This is great but would be even better to have the email addresses of these CEOs so people can write to them and make a specific ask such as “Commit to net zero emissions before 2050 and join the 1000+ companies in the We Mean Business Coalition that have already committed to leading efforts to do their part to stop global warming.” https://www.wemeanbusinesscoalition.org/

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