Chemical industry

As a major user of fossil fuels, the chemical industry contributes to global warming, and its processes and products that generate GHGs exacerbate this problem. Some chemical companies develop environmentally friendly products and technologies that reduce or eliminate GHG emissions.

Background

Before the nineteenth century, chemical industries were relatively modest in size and their releases of carbon dioxide (CO₂) and other pollutants tended to have local, rather than global, effects. As these industries expanded, processes in their factories and the uses of their products led to escalating emissions of CO₂, methane, and nitrous oxide that began influencing global temperatures. However, because of annual temperature fluctuations, the resulting rise in temperature was not clear until the second half of the twentieth century.

How Chemical Industries Contribute to Climate Change

Chemical industries have been vital to the economies of developed and developing nations, but, particularly in the late twentieth and early twenty-first centuries, environmentalists criticized these industries for their unsustainable use of raw materials and for their polluting products and by-products that, among other things, contribute to global warming. In the late twentieth century, some scientists estimated that about one-third of the world’s total energy consumption could be attributed to the chemical industry. The American chemical industry, one of the world’s largest, manufactures over seventy thousand different products. According to Chemical and Engineering News, in 2023, the top fifty US chemical companies had combined revenues of 376.7 billion dollars, an increase of 11.4 percent from the previous year. The chemical industry's emissions in 2022 were 186 metric tons of carbon dioxide equivalents (MTC₂e), a 6 percent increase from 2013, according to the Environmental Production Agency (EPA).

In both developed and developing countries, chemical industries produce greenhouse gases (GHGs) not only directly through the manufacture of various products but also indirectly when these products are used. For example, a major product of the petrochemical industry is gasoline, whose use in automobiles is a significant source of CO₂ emissions. In the United States, the transportation sector was responsible for 28 percent of the country’s emissions, the largest industry sum in 2022. Chlorofluorocarbons (CFCs) are more potent GHGs than CO₂, and because of their effect on the ozone layer, they have a more complex relationship to global warming than CO₂. CFCs’ phenomenal success as refrigerants and in aerosols led to a 500 percent increase in their manufacture by chemical companies from 1960 to 1985. By the late 1980s, scientists knew that CFCs depleted the ozone layer, resulting in dangerous ultraviolet radiation reaching Earth’s surface, but CFCs also accelerated stratospheric cooling. Therefore, it was the radiation effect rather than global warming that, in 1988, led DuPont, the largest manufacturer of CFCs, to stop making them.

By 1990, computerized general-circulation models of the atmosphere had become sufficiently sophisticated, leading to the acceptance of the role of GHGs in global warming. Environmental activists criticized chemical companies for accelerating climate change. In his writings, Barry Commoner contended that the only reason the chemical industry was so successful was that it failed to pay its “environmental bill.” He also acknowledged that if the chemical industry eliminated all pollutants, including GHGs, from their environmental discharges, the costs would probably make these companies unprofitable. Beginning in the late twentieth century, environmental organizations such as Greenpeace attacked various companies such as ExxonMobil for their intransigence in accepting responsibility for adding GHGs to the atmosphere. Environmental organizations continued to speak out against ExxonMobil and similar organizations in the twenty-first century, calling for more action and less climate crisis denial. Some chemical companies initially responded by claiming that circulation models failed precisely to predict specific rises in global temperatures, so chief executive officers should postpone policy decisions on global warming until scientific studies were deemed sufficiently mature to assign responsibility correctly. In 2022, many climate change experts maintained that chemical companies failed to adequately address their contribution to the climate crisis, despite many organizations implementing plans to become more climate friendly.

National and International Regulations

When, in the late twentieth century, a consensus among climatologists developed that anthropogenic GHG emissions from various industries and the use of certain products influenced climate change, national and international actions were taken to reduce concentrations of these molecular culprits. Following the pattern set by laws designed to force chemical companies to reduce or eliminate toxic chemicals from their discharges, several nations passed laws whose purpose was to reduce GHG emissions. In developed countries, many chemical companies claimed that this “overregulation” and “increased environmental costs” would inevitably lead to the decline of their global competitiveness and the loss of many jobs. On the other hand, certain developed nations, such as the United States and the United Kingdom, were leaders in enacting international regulations that resulted in the gradual phase-out of CFCs. In 1987 at a meeting of industrialized nations in Montreal, Canada, an agreement known as the Montreal Protocol was achieved, despite protests from some chemical companies. This treaty was later amended, and eventually, over 175 nations became signatories.

Because of controversies over global warming, consensus among climatologists about GHG emissions came later than the CFC consensus, but in 1997 more than twenty-two hundred delegates from 161 nations met in Kyoto, Japan, to formulate a treaty to help slow global warming. A central provision of the Kyoto Protocol required thirty-nine developed countries to reduce GHG emissions by about 5 percent below 1990 levels by 2012. By 2008, over 180 nations had ratified the Kyoto Protocol, but the United States had neither ratified nor withdrawn from the treaty. President George W. Bush argued that the treaty was inherently unfair since it exempted such developing countries, such as China and India, who accounted for approximately755 percent of carbon emissions in 2023, from restrictions on their GHG emissions. Bush’s stance had the support of many American chemical companies, which had dramatically slowed the construction of US chemical facilities and relocated many of their enterprises in developing countries. Canada withdrew from the treaty in 2012.

In 2015, the Doha Amendment extended the Kyoto Protocol through 2020, but shortly after, the protocol was overshadowed by the Paris Climate Accord. Like the Kyoto Protocol, this, too, was criticized for lacking rigidity and aggression in terms of tackling climate change. The United States, along with most nations who signed the previous protocols, joined the Paris Agreement and pledged individual efforts to lower carbon emissions. These pledges are reexamined each year, allowing for maximum fluidity between the needs of the planet and the capabilities of each country to increase their contribution.

How Chemical Industries Attempt to Mitigate Global Warming

Despite criticisms of the , various international agreements, and the recognition that new and better international climate treaties were needed, an increasing number of chemical companies came to realize that it was in their best interest to reduce GHG emissions. In the United States, companies such as Dow Chemical and DuPont understood that they could increase their profits by making their operations more energy-efficient, with the concomitant benefit of a reduction in GHG emissions. By 2004, DuPont had cut its GHG emissions by 65 percent from their 1990 levels and simultaneously saved hundreds of millions of dollars. Continuing this trend, in 2021, the company reformulated two of its polluting products to cut emissions, and in 2022, it entered a partnership with the UN Global Compact, the World Resources Institute (WRI), and the World Wide Fund for Nature (WWF), to support the Paris Climate Agreement in their business practices. Dow Chemical, using ideas developed by its subsidiaries, invested $1.7 million in GHG reductions and received a 173 percent return on its investment. Similarly, chemical industries in Europe made significant improvements by reducing energy use per unit of product by 40 percent from 1990 to 2004. Dow’s 2025 Sustainability Goals included eliminating plastic use, increasing positive societal impacts, and becoming carbon neutral by 2050. In Asia, several Japanese chemical companies formed the Global Warming Countermeasure Council to substantially decrease their GHG emissions. These and other countries used a variety of methods to achieve these gains in energy efficiency, including emissions-trading arrangements, combining heat and power plants, and the use of powerful catalysts to make products more efficiently and reduce harmful by-products.

Besides reducing their dependence on fossil fuels, many chemical companies promoted climate protection by developing environmentally friendly products and technologies, and a number of these have even started their own environmental businesses. Some chemical companies have developed improved insulation for buildings, while others have created renewable products based on new biopolymers and enzymes. Some factories began making more efficient materials for solar and fuel cells, new ceramics for power plants, and new chemicals for removing GHGs before their discharge into the atmosphere. DuPont created more than ten environmental businesses. Many chemists working for various industries are engaged in research on sequestration, using nanotechnology, mineralization, and other methods to remove CO₂ from the atmosphere. Optimists believe that what the chemical industry has done, with its modest impact on global warming, can be multiplied and intensified, whereas pessimists claim that what has been done is “too little, too late.”

Context

Because of its influence on so many fields, chemistry has often been called the “keystone science,” and, similarly, chemical industries play such vital roles for so many other industries that they have become essential to the success of the global economy. These industries have helped lift impoverished nations to prosperity and prosperous nations to even greater levels of wealth. These gains have not come without costs, particularly to the environment, and these negative environmental effects have resulted in the chemical industry becoming one of the world’s most regulated. Chemical companies are required to spend billions of dollars in operating costs to meet national and international regulations, with the lion’s share of the costs borne by companies that convert such raw materials as petroleum into basic chemicals for commercial uses.

Compliance with the growing regulations on GHG emissions will entail heavy financial burdens, and chemical companies in the developed world have lobbied for flexibility in how these goals are achieved, to avoid not only business failures but also the collapse of national economies. Because the stakes are so high, between the Scylla of world economic collapse and the Charybdis of the flooding of major coastal cities, the scientifically correct diagnosis of and solution to the problem of global warming are imperative. Just as the chemical industry has had an important part in creating this problem, so, too, will it have to be deeply involved in its solution.

Key Concepts

• fossil fuels: hydrocarbon materials formed from carboniferous organic life in geologic deposits of natural gas, petroleum, and coal
• greenhouse effect: an atmospheric warming phenomenon by which certain gases act like glass in a greenhouse, allowing the transmission of ultraviolet solar radiation but trapping infrared terrestrial radiation
• greenhouse gases (GHGs): gases such as carbon dioxide, chlorofluorocarbons (CFCs), methane, water vapor, and nitrous oxide that cause the greenhouse effect
• ozone layer: a region of the stratosphere with high concentrations of triatomic oxygen, which absorbs much solar ultraviolet radiation that would be harmful to life if it reached Earth’s surface
• petrochemical industries: businesses that refine crude oil to create raw materials needed in the manufacture of most chemicals, from fertilizers and pesticides to plastics, synthetic fibers, and medicines

Bibliography

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