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Washington Metropolitan Police Department officer Michael Fanone listens testimony during the select committee investigation of the January 6th attack on the U.S. Capitol. (photo: Andrew Harnik/AFP/Getty Images)
“They tortured me. They beat me. I was struck with a taser device at the base of my skull numerous times,” said D.C. Police Officer Michael Fanone.
he officers who defended the Capitol against a violent mob on January 6 suffered beatings, concussions, contusions, electrocutions, heart attacks. But more damage has been inflicted by Republicans who’ve refused to acknowledge the horror of the day, they testified on Tuesday.
“I was electrocuted again and again and again with a taser. I'm sure I was screaming, but I don't think I could even hear my own voice,” Metropolitan Police Officer Michael Fanone testified during the first hearing held by the House January 6 Select Committee.
“They tortured me. They beat me. I was struck with a taser device at the base of my skull numerous times, and they continued to do so until I yelled out that I have kids,” he said later.
Fanone had a heart attack as a result of the beating and was also diagnosed with a concussion, traumatic brain injury, and post-traumatic stress disorder.
“What makes the struggle harder and more painful is to know so many of my fellow citizens, including so many of the people I put my life at risk to defend, are downplaying or outright denying what happened,” Fanone continued, the fury in his voice barely contained. “I feel like I went to hell and back to protect them and the people in this room. But too many are now telling me that hell doesn’t exist or hell actually wasn’t that bad. The indifference shown to my colleagues is disgraceful.”
Congressional Republicans blocked the creation of a bipartisan commission to investigate what happened on January 6. That led to the creation of this current committee. House Minority Leader Kevin McCarthy then chose to boycott these hearings after House Speaker Nancy Pelosi rejected two of his appointees. But two Republicans—Wyoming Rep. Liz Cheney and Illinois Rep. Adam Kinzinger—agreed to participate.
Fanone wasn’t the only one who expressed anger that both President Trump, who incited the attack, and the House Republicans who the officers helped protect on the day of the insurrection had sought to downplay the events and gaslight America about the severity of the attacks.
Capitol Police Sergeant Aquilino Gonell testified that he thought he was going to die on that day, and that his experience that day was scarier than his time serving in the military in Iraq.
“I could have lost my life that day not once but many times.”
“I could have lost my life that day not once but many times,” he said.
When Cheney asked about President Trump’s recent claims that many rioters were “hugging and kissing” the police, Gonell fired back, calling the remarks “upsetting” and “demoralizing.”
“It’s a pathetic excuse for his behavior for something that he himself helped create, with this monstrosity. I’m still recovering from those ‘hugs and kisses,’” he said. “If that was hugs and kisses then we all should go to his house and do the same thing to him.”
Aquilino later walked back his comment that Trump should face the same experience, apologizing for his “outburst.” But he made clear how frustrated he was with “pathetic” congressional Republicans who are looking to move on from the attacks.
“People need to understand the severity and magnitude of what happened that day. We were all fighting for our lives to give them, to live you guys a chance to go home to your family, to escape. And now the same people who we helped… now they are attacking us. They’re attacking our character,” he said. “They swore an oath and they’re forgetting about that oath. They’re not putting the country before their party.”
Kinzinger teared up as he thanked the officers for their service—and admonished his party for shirking their democratic responsibilities.
“You guys won. You guys held,” he said. "Many in my party have treated this as just another partisan fight. It's toxic and it's a disservice to the officers and their families."
Metropolitan Police Officer Daniel Hodges was trapped in a hallway and attacked by insurrectionists who beat him around the head and tore off his gas mask as he was pinned with his arms at his side, unable to move.
He repeatedly called the attackers “terrorists.”
"The mob of terrorists were shouting 'heave, ho' and they pushed their way forward. A man in front of me grabbed my baton ... he bashed me in the face and head with it,” he said. “I did the only thing I could do and screamed for help."
Capitol police officer Harry Dunn, who is Black, testified that he repeatedly was called a “nigger” by white rioters as he protected the Capitol. After one woman yelled at him “This n----- voted for Joe Biden,” he said 20 or so joined in to boo him, with some repeating the racial epithet.
Dunn said that as soon as the riot dispersed, he broke down.
“How the blank can something like this happen? Is this America?” he said he remembers shouting. “I began sobbing.”
“More than six months later, January 6 still isn’t over for me,” Dunn said. “I know so many officers continue to hurt both physically and emotionally.”
As American troops depart, winding down a twenty-year intervention, Afghans are forced to reckon with the question of whether their government can stand on its own against the Taliban. (photo: Adam Ferguson/New Yorker)
Let me bore you for 30 seconds, before you start reading my latest piece. Consider this my small (if never-ending) reminder that TomDispatch exists only because its readers have so wonderfully supported it these last almost 19 years! Unfortunately, such support is still truly needed simply to cover the costs of running this site (though I personally take none of your money). If you’re faintly in the mood, do look at the TD donation page and think about what you might give — and know that you make all the difference! Tom]
-Tom Engelhardt, TomDispatch
The Forbidden Word
Is This Country Heading for the Exit?
t was all so long ago, in a world seemingly without challengers. Do you even remember when we Americans lived on a planet with a recumbent Russia, a barely rising China, and no obvious foes except what later came to be known as an “axis of evil,” three countries then incapable of endangering this one? Oh, and, as it turned out, a rich young Saudi former ally, Osama bin Laden, and 19 hijackers, mostly of them also Saudis, from a tiny group called al-Qaeda that briefly possessed an “air force” of four commercial jets. No wonder this country was then touted as the greatest force, the superest superpower ever, sporting a military that left all others in the dust.
And then, of course, came the launching of the Global War on Terror, which soon would be normalized as the plain-old, uncapitalized “war on terror.” Yes, that very war — even if nobody’s called it that for years — began on September 11, 2001. At a Pentagon partially in ruins, Secretary of Defense Donald Rumsfeld, already aware that the destruction around him was probably Osama bin Laden’s responsibility, ordered his aides to begin planning for a retaliatory strike against… Saddam Hussein’s Iraq. Rumsfeld’s exact words (an aide wrote them down) were: “Go massive. Sweep it all up. Things related and not.”
Things related and not. Sit with that phrase for a moment. In their own strange way, those four words, uttered in the initial hours after the destruction of New York’s World Trade Center and part of the Pentagon, still seem to capture the twenty-first-century American experience.
Within days of 9/11, Rumsfeld, who served four presidents before recently stepping off this world at 88, and the president he then worked for, George W. Bush, would officially launch that Global War on Terror. They would ambitiously target supposed terror networks in no less than 60 countries. (Yep, that was Rumsfeld’s number!) They would invade Afghanistan and, less than a year and a half later, do the same on a far grander scale in Iraq to take down its autocratic ruler, Saddam Hussein, who had once been a hand-shaking buddy of the secretary of defense.
Despite rumors passed around at the time by supporters of such an invasion, Saddam had nothing to do with 9/11; nor, despite Bush administration claims, was his regime then developing or in possession of weapons of mass destruction; nor, if we didn’t act, would an Iraqi mushroom cloud have one day risen over New York or some other American city. And mind you, both of those invasions and so much more would be done in the name of “liberating” peoples and spreading American-style democracy across the Greater Middle East. Or, put another way, in response to that devastating attack by those 19 hijackers armed with knives, the U.S. was preparing to invade and dominate the oil-rich Middle East until the end of time. In 2021, almost two decades later, doesn’t that seem like another lifetime to you?
By the way, you’ll note that there’s one word missing in action in all of the above. Believe me, if what I just described had related to Soviet plans during the Cold War, you can bet your bottom dollar that word would have been all over Washington. I’m thinking, of course, of “empire” or, in its adjectival form, “imperial.” Had the Soviet Union planned similar acts to “liberate” peoples by “spreading communism,” it would have been seen in Washington as the most imperial project ever. In the early years of this century, however, with the Soviet Union long gone and America’s leaders imagining that they might reign supreme globally until the end of time, those two words were banished to history.
It was obvious that, despite the unprecedented 800 or so military bases this country possessed around the world, imperial powers were distinctly a thing of the past.
“Empires Have Gone There and Not Done It”
Now, keep that thought in abeyance for a moment, while I take you on a quick tour of the long-forgotten Global War on Terror. Almost two decades later, it does seem to be drawing to some kind of lingering close. Yes, there are still those 650 American troops guarding our embassy in the Afghan capital, Kabul, and there is still that “over-the-horizon capacity” the president cites for U.S. aircraft to strike Taliban forces, even if American troops only recently abandoned their last air base in Afghanistan; and yes, there are still about 2,500 American troops stationed in Iraq (and hundreds more at bases across the border in Syria), regularly being attacked by Iraqi militia groups.
Similarly, despite the withdrawal of U.S. forces from Somalia as the Trump years ended, over-the-horizon airstrikes against the terror group al-Shabaab, halted when Joe Biden entered the Oval Office, have just been started again, assumedly from bases in Kenya or Djibouti; and yes, the horrendous war in Yemen continues with the U.S. still supporting the Saudis, even if by offering “defensive,” not “offensive” aid; and yes, American special operators are also stationed in staggering numbers of countries around the globe; and yes, prisoners are still being held in Guantanamo, that offshore Bermuda Triangle of injustice created by the Bush administration so long ago. Admittedly, officials in the new Biden Justice Department are at least debating, however indecisively, whether those detainees might have any due process rights under the Constitution (yes, that’s the U.S. Constitution!) and their numbers are at a historic low since 2002 of 39.
Still, let’s face it, this isn’t the set of conflicts that, once upon a time, involved invasions, massive air strikes, occupations, the killing of staggering numbers of civilians, widespread drone attacks, the disruption of whole countries, the uprooting and displacement of more than 37 million people, the deployment at one point of 100,000 U.S. troops in Afghanistan alone, and the spending of untold trillions of American taxpayer dollars, all in the name of fighting terror and spreading democracy. And think of it as mission (un)accomplished in the truest sense imaginable.
In fact, that idea of spreading of democracy didn’t really outlast the Bush years. Ever since, there’s been remarkably little discussion in official Washington about what this country was really doing as it warred across significant parts of the planet. Yes, those two decades of conflict, those “forever wars,” as they came to be called first by critics and then by anyone in sight, are at least winding, or perhaps spiraling, down — and yet, here’s the strange thing: Wouldn’t you think that, as they ended in visible failure, the Pentagon’s stock might also be falling? Oddly enough, though, in the wake of all those years of losing wars, it’s still rising. The Pentagon budget only heads ever more for the stratosphere as foreign policy “pivots” from the Greater Middle East to Asia (and Russia and the Arctic and, well, anywhere but those places where terror groups still roam).
In other words, when it comes to the U.S. military as it tries to leave its forever wars in someone else’s ditch, failure is the new success story. Perhaps not so surprisingly, then, the losing generals who fought those wars, while eternally promising that “corners” were being turned and “progress” made, have almost all either continued to rise in the ranks or gotten golden parachutes into other parts of the military-industrial complex. That should shock Americans, but really never seems to. Yes, striking percentages of us support leaving Afghanistan and the Afghans in a ditch somewhere and moving on, but it’s still generally a big “thank you for your service” to our military commanders and the Pentagon.
Looking back, however, isn’t the real question — not that anyone’s asking — this: What was America’s mission during all those years? In reality, I don’t think it’s possible to answer that or explain any of it without using the forbidden noun and adjective I mentioned earlier. And, to my surprise, after all these years when it never crossed the lips of an American president, Joe Biden, the guy who’s been insisting that “America is back” on this failing planet of ours, actually used that very word!
In a recent news conference, irritated to find himself endlessly discussing his decision to pull U.S. forces out of Afghanistan, he fielded this question from a reporter: “Given the amount of money that has been spent and the number of lives that have been lost, in your view, with making this decision, were the last 20 years worth it?”
His response: “I argued, from the beginning [in the Obama years], as you may recall — it came to light after the administration was over… No nation has ever unified Afghanistan, no nation. Empires have gone there and not done it.”
So, there! Yes, it was vague and could simply have been a reference to the fate in Afghanistan, that famed “graveyard of empires,” of the British empire in the nineteenth century and the Soviet one in the twentieth century. But I can’t help thinking that a president, however minimally, however indirectly, however much without even meaning to, finally acknowledged that this country, too, was on an imperial mission there and globally as well, a mission not of spreading democracy or of liberation but of domination. Otherwise, how the hell do you explain those 800 military bases on every continent but Antarctica? Is that really spreading democracy? Is that really liberating humanity? It’s not a subject discussed in this country, but believe me, if it were any other place, the words “empire” and “imperial” would be on all too many lips in Washington and the urge to dominate in such a fashion would have been roundly denounced in our nation’s capital.
A Failing Empire with a Flailing Military?
Here’s a question for you: If the U.S. is “back,” as our president has been claiming, what exactly is it back as? What could it be, now that it’s proven itself incapable of dominating the planet in the fashion its political leaders once dreamed of? Could this country, which in these years dumped trillions of taxpayer dollars into its forever wars, now perhaps be reclassified as a failing empire with a flailing military?
Of course, such a possibility isn’t generally acknowledged here. If, for instance, Kabul falls to the Taliban months from now and U.S. diplomats need to be rescued from the roof of our embassy there, as happened in Saigon in 1975 — something the president has vehemently denied is even possible — count on one thing: a bunch of Republicans and right-wing pundits will instantly be down his throat for leaving “too fast.” (Of course, some of them already are, including, as it happens, the very president who launched the 2001 invasion, only to almost instantly refocus his attention on invading Iraq.)
Even domestically, when you think about where our money truly goes, inequality of every sort is only growing more profound, with America’s billionaires ever wealthier and more numerous, while the Pentagon and those weapons-making corporations float ever higher on taxpayer dollars, and the bills elsewhere go unpaid. In that sense, perhaps it’s time to start thinking about the United States as a failing imperial system at home as well as abroad. Sadly, whether globally or domestically, all of this seems hard for Americans to take in or truly describe (hence, perhaps, the madness of Donald Trump’s America). After all, if you can’t even use the words “imperial” and “empire,” then how are you going to understand what’s happening to you?
Still, forget any fantasies about us spreading democracy abroad. We’re now in a country that’s visibly threatening to lose democracy at home. Forget Afghanistan. From the January 6th assault on the Capitol to the latest (anti-)voting laws in Texas and elsewhere, there’s a flailing, failing system right here in the U.S. of A. And unlike Afghanistan, it’s not one that a president can withdraw from.
Yes, globally, the Biden administration has seemed remarkably eager to enter a new Cold War with China and “pivot” to Asia, as the Pentagon continues to build up its forces, from naval to nuclear, as if this country were indeed still the reigning imperial power on the planet. But it’s not.
The real question may be this: Three decades after the Soviet empire headed for the exit, is it possible that the far more powerful American one is ever so chaotically heading in the same direction? And if so, what does that mean for the rest of us?
Follow TomDispatch on Twitter and join us on Facebook. Check out the newest Dispatch Books, John Feffer’s new dystopian novel, Songlands (the final one in his Splinterlands series), Beverly Gologorsky’s novel Every Body Has a Story, and Tom Engelhardt’s A Nation Unmade by War, as well as Alfred McCoy’s In the Shadows of the American Century: The Rise and Decline of U.S. Global Power and John Dower’s The Violent American Century: War and Terror Since World War II.
California lawmakers passed the guaranteed income bill with bipartisan support. (photo: Rich Pedroncelli/AP)
The aromatic tree resin, used in perfumes and incense, has been the primary source of income for locals for nearly 300 years.
But in 2009, the frankincense forest became a battle zone when a company owned by one of Indonesia’s richest families obtained a permit to clear it for a pulpwood plantation.
That year, Ganjang tried to defend the forest when company employees, accompanied by armed police, plowed into it with excavators.
“If you dare to shoot me, shoot [me]! I’m not afraid!” he said, recalling what he yelled at one of the police officers.
The conflict is one of hundreds, perhaps thousands, of disputes over land rights between local communities and natural resources firms in Indonesia, where agribusiness and extractives are among the nation’s biggest industries.
Compared to many of these disputes, which can persist for years or even decades, the struggle by Ganjang’s community might be seen as a success story. Following a landmark 2013 Constitutional Court ruling that struck down the state’s claim to Indigenous peoples’ forests across the country, Pandumaan-Sipituhuta became one of the first Indigenous communities to receive formal recognition of its territory from the government.
But although Indigenous peoples have since claimed tens of millions of hectares of Indonesian land as their own, according to AMAN, the nation’s main advocacy group for Indigenous peoples, as of early 2021 the government had only recognized the rights of Indigenous peoples to their ancestral forests on 56,903 hectares (140,610 acres).
Now that the rights to manage some of their ancestral forest have been guaranteed, the Pandumaan-Sipituhuta villagers can go into the forest and cultivate the frankincense trees with less fear of facing criminal charges brought by the company.
Some 700 households in Pandumaan-Sipituhuta are now trying to restore the damaged parts of their forest by spreading frankincense seeds. Others, like Ganjang, are returning to their routine of going to the forest to tap the trees.
But even as the government has recognized the land rights of the community, the villagers must still must pass through the pulpwood plantation of PT Toba Pulp Lestari (TPL), owned by Indonesia’s billionaire Tanoto family, to access the forest.
One day recently, Mongabay accompanied Ganjang to the forest on his daily rounds. He had to leave his identity card at the guard post outside the plantation and ask for permission to pass.
After a half-hour walk, Ganjang stopped at a small hut where other frankincense harvesters were resting, grabbed his equipment, and got to work.
To extract the resin, Ganjang taps into the trees with a tool that looks like screwdriver. Four months later, the yellowish resin oozes out of the trunks for Ganjang to collect.
Ganjang manages 3 hectares (7.4 acres) of the forest. His plot holds 2,100 trees, which produce 150 kilograms (330 pounds) of
He sells the resin in the district capital, earning money to feed his wife, four daughters and three grandchildren.
While harvesting the resin, Ganjang also collects frankincense seeds scattered on the ground.
“We replant the seeds of frankincense trees that are in the forest,” Ganjang says, adding that he does this to pay respect to his ancestors.
A history of struggle
The significance of the frankincense trees resonates in a local tale about a villager who was exiled to the forest because she was thought to have violated a traditional custom.
Years later, her parents returned to the forest, but couldn’t find her; she had transformed into a tree. When they touched the trunk, a liquid oozed out from it, like human tears. This liquid, so the story goes, is frankincense tree resin, which locals use to concoct medicines and burn as incense.
The fragrance of the frankincense serves as a medium for prayer and is believed to be able to summon the spirits of ancestors.
“If those activities [of extracting frankincense] are disturbed or damaged by other parties without the permission of the locals, then they will be enraged,” Roganda Simanjuntak, the head of the local chapter of AMAN, tells Mongabay.
This rage is palpable when speaking with a villager named Rusmedia Lumbangaol, who gets upset whenever she hears the name TPL.
Ever since the company cleared the forest to establish its plantation, she says, the villagers’ harvests of crops such as coffee have declined, and pest attacks have increased.
As Rusmedia explains how the company degraded the environment, she squeezes the coffee cherries just harvested from her plantation. A tiny caterpillar crawls out of one. She says this never happened before the company entered the area.
Not far from Rusmedia’s plantation is a shallow river with reddish water and a slow current. She says the river used to be deep and had clear water.
“This [change] happened after eucalyptus trees [for pulpwood] were planted around the forest,” Rusmedia says. She adds the humus in the soil has been declining ever since the pulpwood plantation was established.
In the past, Rusmedia says, her husband could bring home up to 20 kg (44 lb) of frankincense resin each week. Now, it’s just 5 kg (11 lb) per week.
The company’s presence in the area has upset the locals, and occasional clashes have erupted.
In September 2012, a clash broke out between villagers, on one side, and the company’s employees and anti-riot police, on the other side, as the company was trying to establish its plantation.
When she heard about the incident, Rusmedia says, she rushed to the entrance of the village where trucks were taking felled logs out of the forest, in an effort to block them.
“If [I] have to fall victim, I’m ready [dear] God,” she tells Mongabay, tearing up as she recalls the incident.
Food estate
The villagers’ struggle started to bear fruit in 2016, when President Joko Widodo recognized a chunk of the area as the Pandumaan-Sipituhuta Indigenous community’s ancestral forest.
A later participatory mapping process found that the Indigenous people occupy 6,001 hectares (14,828 acres) of ancestral lands, consisting of 3,935 hectares (9,723 acres) of frankincense forest and 2,066 hectares (5,105 acres) of village and plantation areas.
The presidential decree was further strengthened by a decree issued by the elected leader of Humbang Hasundutan district in 2019, which reiterated that the size of the Pandumaan-Sipituhuta forest is 5,172 hectares (12,780 acres).
That same year, the district head, Dosmar Banjarnahor, also issued a regulation that served as legal protection for the rights of the Pandumaan-Sipituhuta Indigenous community.
However, at the end of 2020, the Ministry of Environment and Forestry reduced the size of the ancestral forest to 2,393 hectares (5,913 acres), reallocating two-thirds of the area for industrial-scale plantation development under the Widodo administration’s “food estate” program. The program aims to establish large plantations of staple crops to boost Indonesia’s food security.
Dosmar said he was left in the dark by the decision, and thus caught by surprise when he found out from the villagers that the government had slashed the size of their ancestral forest. Dosmar’s district administration, it turned out, had failed to account for the food estate program when submitting its proposal for customary forest recognition to the environment ministry.
Dosmar then called the environment ministry’s social forestry director-general, Bambang Supriyanto, who explained to him that the reduction in size was based on an analysis done by the ministry’s team on the ground. According to the ministry, there were no frankincense trees in the area earmarked for the food estate program.
In January, Dosmar said he had established a team to check whether the food estate program really overlaps with the customary forest.
Febri Lumbangaol, a Pandumaan-Sipituhuta villager, says it’s regrettable that the environment ministry reduced the size of the customary forest.
“We’re disappointed that the government broke its promise,” he said. “We want our ancestral forest back intact.”
Kersi Sihite, another villager, says he doesn’t want the frankincense trees to disappear from their land because of the food estate program.
“Whatever and whenever, we will keep fighting to protect [our] customary forest without being disturbed by anyone,” he says.
This article was originally published on Mongabay.
Cargo containers and tractor trailers at the Seagirt Marine Terminal in the Port of Baltimore. (photo: Brendan Smialowski/AFP/Getty Images)
Walmart and other retail giants import millions of goods on polluting cargo ships.
ake a look around your home and you’ll likely find plenty of goods that traveled by cargo ship to your doorstep. A set of IKEA plates made in China. A dresser full of pandemic-era loungewear, ordered on Target and made in Guatemala, Sri Lanka, and Vietnam. Tracing the impact on the environment from shipping any of these goods is incredibly tricky to do. The data — if you can find it — involves many companies, countries, and cargo carriers.
Such obscurity makes it hard to count the full cost of our consumption. But a recent report helps unravel some of the mystery.
Two environmental groups, Pacific Environment and Stand.earth, worked with prominent maritime researchers to track goods imported by the 15 largest retail giants in the United States. They then quantified the greenhouse gas emissions and air pollutants associated with those imports, usually ferried across the oceans on cargo ships running on dirty bunker fuel. In 2019, importing some 3.8 million shipping containers’ worth of cargo generated as much carbon dioxide emissions as three coal-fired power plants. These shipments also produced as much smog-forming nitrous oxide as 27.4 million cars and trucks do in a year, according to the report.
“Our report affirms that these retail giants’ dirty ocean shipping is fueling the climate crisis,” said Madeline Rose, climate campaign director for Pacific Environment and the study’s lead author.
The study is the first to trace retailers’ shipping-related emissions, and it used data from a separate, larger project to track the industry’s emissions that’s set to launch in October. The findings are likely just a snapshot of the true environmental toll: Researchers said they could only verify emissions for one-fifth of shipments by the 15 retailers, owing to a lack of data and the companies’ use of shell companies and franchises.
The largest retail company in the United States, Walmart, was also the biggest polluter of the bunch. In 2019, Walmart imported enough goods to equal 893,000 shipping containers, resulting in some 3.7 million metric tons of carbon dioxide emissions.
Maritime shipping is a crucial part of the global economy. About 80 percent of everything bought and sold travels on oil-burning, seafaring freighters at some point. All that shipping activity accounts for nearly 3 percent of the world’s annual greenhouse gas emissions, as well as a significant share of air pollution in coastal communities. The International Maritime Organization, which regulates the industry, has recently adopted measures to curb cargo ship emissions and reduce fuel consumption. But experts say stronger regulations and bigger investments are needed to steer the industry away from fossil fuels and toward cleaner technologies, such as hydrogen fuel cells, batteries, and wind-harnessing devices.
Another way to spur companies to action is through accounting — figuring out how many emissions are produced by which activity, from which company, at which location. In the world of ocean freight, a shipment of cargo can pass through many hands and even owners between the time it leaves a factory and reaches a warehouse on the other side of the planet. The goal of the new research, Rose said, is “to bring baseline environmental and public health accounting oversight to this incredibly murky issue.”
For the report, the environmental groups commissioned University Maritime Advisory Services, or UMAS, a well-regarded research consultancy in London. UMAS has developed a proprietary tool for estimating fuel consumption and emissions from individual ships and is also a partner in the SEA-CASE project at the Stockholm Environment Institute. That initiative has gathered billions of records on vessel movements, detailed shipment lists, import and export data, and other information from big economies like the United States, Brazil, and China.
“Once you combine all of that data, it’s a very powerful thing,” said Javier Godar, a senior research fellow at the Stockholm Environment Institute, who was not directly involved in writing the July report. “You can really start looking at responsibility for those emissions.”
After Walmart, the next top polluter in the report was Ashley Furniture, which imported 270,000 containers and generated over 2.2 million metric tons of CO2. Next up was Target, with some 600,000 containers and over 2 million metric tons of CO2. Researchers could only track some 123,000 container imports for Amazon, a company whose 2019 revenues topped $280 billion. Those imports were responsible for more than 390,000 metric tons of emissions.
Representatives from Walmart and Amazon didn’t comment directly on the study but provided information on their companies’ efforts to curb emissions from their supply chains. In response to a request for comment, a Target spokesperson said the company is committed to “reducing our shipping carbon footprint,” as it works toward becoming a “net zero enterprise” in its operations and supply chain by 2040.
A spokesperson from IKEA, which came in seventh place for CO2 output, said addressing emissions from cargo ships is “a significant topic” for the Swedish furniture giant. Ocean shipping accounts for about 40 percent of IKEA’s total carbon emissions from transportation. The spokesperson said the company is working to reduce its carbon footprint from every shipment by 70 percent on average by 2030. To that end, IKEA participated in a 2019 pilot project to test biofuels in an ocean-going container ship.
Researchers who worked on the retail-focused report said it took them months to scour and analyze data. And it’s taken years to develop the statistical models and build the database that underpin the recent findings.
Godar said his ship tracking efforts began in 2014 with the launch of Trase, an online database that follows the flow of agricultural commodities that are driving deforestation in tropical countries. A United Nations report might show the total amount of soy shipped from Brazil. With Trase, however, the idea is to discern whether that soy came from, say, illegal logging in the Amazon rainforest or a legal farm elsewhere, and then follow that to the final customer.
Researchers are increasingly able to access such valuable information as more companies keep records in digital form, Godar said, and as the ability to “scrape” data from the internet improves. Still, there are limits. Most data isn’t publicly available, and it’s expensive for researchers to buy. Godar hasn’t been able to get a hold of shipping-related data from the European Union and other countries, which leaves an informational black hole.
A beta version of the SEA-CASE platform will launch this fall and be free for anyone to access. A preview over Zoom showed a flurry of yellow lines connecting continents, each one revealing a detailed breakdown of a particular voyage in 2019. A casual user could, for example, trace coffee imports by Starbucks into the United States, then see the carbon emissions associated with the shipments.
Ultimately, this kind of information could help consumers push retailers to cut carbon emissions from their suppliers, said Gary Cook, the global climate campaigns director for Stand.earth. Cook previously led Greenpeace campaigns challenging tech giants like Facebook and Apple to stop powering their data centers with coal-fired electricity and replace it with renewable energy.
“Companies can move very fast when motivated,” he said. “It’s to their advantage to show their loyal customers they care about the climate and are taking action.”
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