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As world leaders prepare to meet in Glasgow next week to address the devastating impact of bushfires, flooding and extreme weather caused by rising greenhouse gases, a rebellion within the world’s most influential consulting firm McKinsey & Company over its support for the United States. rising. the planet’s biggest polluters.

More than 1,100 employees and numerous employees signed an open letter to the firm’s best partners, encouraging them to explain how much carbon their customers are emitting into the atmosphere. “The climate crisis is the defining problem of our generation,” the authors of the letter, made up of nearly a dozen McKinsey advisors, wrote. “Our positive impact in other areas will mean nothing if we don’t act like our customers are changing the world irreversibly.”

Many of the authors have resigned since the never-reported letter was published last spring—one sent out a widely shared email citing McKinsey’s continued work with fossil fuel companies as the primary reason for leaving.

McKinsey publicly says: protect the planet” and has been helping clients with environmental issues for over a decade. It held a Climate Action Day on October 15, informing employees of progress towards the goal of having a net zero carbon footprint by 2030. Yet McKinsey’s own carbon footprint is tiny compared to that of many of the companies it recommends.

So far, McKinsey has largely escaped scrutiny of its dealings with oil, gas and coal companies, as it closely guards the identity of its customers. But public records such as internal documents reviewed by The New York Times, interviews with four former McKinsey employees, and lawsuits shed new light on the extraordinary scope of this work.

Among the top 100 corporate polluters in the past half-century, McKinsey has advised at least 43 in recent years, including BP, Exxon Mobil, Gazprom and Saudi Aramco, and has received hundreds of millions of dollars in fees for the firm.

Around the world, from China to the United States, McKinsey’s work with these companies often focuses not on reducing their environmental impact, but on reducing costs, increasing productivity and increasing profits.

In 2018, these customers alone, not including other McKinsey-recommended pollutants, were responsible for more than a third of global carbon emissions. Climate Responsibility Instituteis a nonprofit that monitors corporate emissions and fossil fuels burned by these companies’ customers.

McKinsey spokesman DJ Carella said in a statement that reducing emissions worldwide “requires engaging with high-emission industries to assist their transition.”

“Getting away from these sectors might appease absolutist critics,” he said, “but it does nothing to solve the climate problem.”

McKinsey is not alone among consulting firms when it comes to working with major pollutants. Boston Consulting Group’s also recommended Major carbon emitters, including Angola’s state-owned oil giant Sonangol. BCG notes He said he was a “consulting partner” to the United Nations’ climate summit in Glasgow.

Still, McKinsey stands out with its 95-year history and its position at the top of the consulting world. The advisory staff, filled with Rhodes academics and Harvard Business School highlights, could focus their talents on helping the firm’s oil, gas and coal customers reduce their emissions. But these well-funded clients like Chevron, Shell and Teck Resources from Canada hire McKinsey for more advanced business goals that often have little to do with the global push to limit greenhouse gases.

McKinsey’s ties to the fossil fuel industry run deep. More than half a century ago, Mobil, Shell and Texaco helped push McKinsey to the top of consulting firms.

A few weeks after Dominic Barton stepped down as managing partner of McKinsey in 2018, elected president of Teck, a Vancouver-based company that blasts mountains in the Rockies in search of coal for steel mills. Teck is one of the world’s largest steel coal exporters and in 2019 carbon footprint – when accounting for coal burned by customers – equivalent to one-tenth of Canada’s greenhouse gases emissions.

In the first full year after Mr. Barton came to Teck, McKinsey’s work there increased. Among his projects was a mine in British Columbia called “Coal Processing Optimization”. Another mission was simply labeled “Drill and Blast,” McKinsey records show. Donald R. Lindsay, Teck’s CEO, said in his annual report for 2019: said He said a project McKinsey consulted “helped increase efficiency and cut costs.”

In Asia, McKinsey released a video boasting that it helped increase production at a coal company by 26 percent, according to a 2019 memo by Erik Edstrom, a departing McKinsey consultant who was concerned about the company’s environmental impact. “It looks like McKinsey has helped our client extract more, pollute more, possibly for a longer period of time,” he wrote.

Mr Barton, who left Teck when he was appointed Canadian ambassador to China in 2019, did not respond to a request for comment through Canadian government press officials. The company is “committed to supporting global action on climate change and we are taking action to reduce our GHG emissions, including setting the goal of being carbon neutral in our operations,” Teck spokesman Chris Stannell said in a statement. 2050.”

Mr Carella said it was “highly misleading” to focus on a single company, namely Teck, as “evidence that McKinsey’s work is exacerbating climate change”, but The Times gave the consulting firm a list of 43 major carbon pollutants that have recently had clients. .

He said the firm is investing in sustainability efforts and until the world deprives itself of fossil fuels, “billions of people around the world, particularly in emerging economies, will rely on the jobs, energy and materials provided by the companies you mention.” ”

McKinsey’s power to influence the decisions of the largest international polluters is why a group of nearly a dozen consultants sent an open letter last spring. According to three former McKinsey employees, the company has amassed more than 1,100 co-signers as it spanned its global operations.

The authors said that McKinsey’s failure to address its customers’ emissions “puts at serious risk to our reputation, our customer relationships, and our ability to build a great firm that attracts, develops, excites and retains ‘exceptional people’.” they also wrote that it presents a “significant opportunity” to McKinsey.

They committed to helping McKinsey not only fix its own emissions, but also make its customers publicly aware of the total amount of carbon pollution it produces, and do their bit to limit global temperature rise to 1.5 degrees Celsius. Beyond this threshold, scientists say, the dangers of global warming will skyrocket.

The authors said McKinsey has “a moral obligation to take action to impact our customers’ emissions and to demonstrate the leadership our stakeholders expect from us.”

On April 5, the firm’s managing partner Kevin Sneader and his appointed successor, Bob Sternfels, responded to the open letter. In a note, they said they “share your view that the climate issue is a defining issue for our planet and for all generations” and will discuss the firm’s direction on climate change at a company-wide “problem” meeting on Earth Day, April 22. something to me” event.

Before that incident, Mr. Sneader announced McKinsey will help its customers reduce their emissions to meet the 1.5 degree goal. “Our goal is to be the largest private sector catalyst for decarbonisation,” he said.

Mr. Sneader and Mr. Sternfels, who took their place in July, made clear in their call for Earth Day that McKinsey will continue to serve the major polluters. Their message: According to a summary obtained by The Times, McKinsey had to continue working with them to stay relevant.

A spokesperson for McKinsey said the firm had already addressed the issues raised at the time the letter was sent and created a new platform to help customers reduce their emissions. However, McKinsey’s steps did not satisfy everyone.

In late July, Rizwan Naveed, one of the letter’s authors whose work at McKinsey focuses on energy and decarbonisation, sent an email to hundreds of colleagues. Former employees were leaving McKinsey – one of the few such departures in recent months.

“Given the actual hours billed to the world’s biggest polluters, it’s hard to argue that McKinsey is the ‘largest private sector catalyst for decarbonisation’ today,” he wrote. “It could also be the other way around.”