A report points the finger at 20 fossil fuel giants: 35 per cent of the emissions that have led to the climate emergency can be attributed to them.
The climate crisis is approaching the point of no return. If the global community fails to reach net-zero emissions by 2050, it will be impossible to keep the rise in global temperatures within 1.5 degrees above pre-industrial levels. The Special Report 15 (SR15) published a year ago by the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (Ipcc) makes things clear: just half a degree more would bring catastrophic consequences. Ice-free summers in the Arctic at least once every 10 years, a flood risk rising by 170 per cent, 410 million urban residents struggling with drought, and the end of coral reefs.
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Faced with such a prospect, it becomes all the more shocking to discover that greenhouse gas emissions — the very ones that, according to 97 per cent of scientists, drive climate change — are the result of the actions of a few, very few actors. To be precise, just twenty fossil fuel giants are responsible for more than a third of the greenhouse gases emitted into the atmosphere over the last half-century.
The revelation comes from the Guardian, which exclusively published the findings of research conducted by Richard Heede for the Climate Accountability Institute. Drawing on the annual reports published by individual companies, it was possible to reconstruct the total volume of oil, coal and natural gas extracted from 1965 to the present day. This date was chosen as the starting point because, according to experts, political and industrial leaders were already aware at the time of the environmental impact of fossil fuels. The researchers then calculated CO2 and methane emissions across the entire supply chain, from extraction to end use.
| Company | CO2 equivalent in billions of tonnes |
|---|---|
| Saudi Aramco | 59.26 |
| Chevron | 43.35 |
| Gazprom | 43.23 |
| ExxonMobil | 41.90 |
| National Iranian Oil Co | 35.66 |
| BP | 34.02 |
| Royal Dutch Shell | 31.95 |
| Coal India | 23.12 |
| Pemex | 22.65 |
| Petróleos de Venezuela | 15.75 |
The top 20 companies in the ranking are responsible for 480 billion tonnes of CO2 equivalent, that is, 35 per cent of energy-related emissions across the entire planet over the five decades considered. Ironically, more than half the names on this list are state-owned, starting with Saudi Aramco (which alone accounts for 4.30 per cent of the total), through Russia's Gazprom, and then National Iranian Oil Co, Coal India, and Mexico's Pemex.
Ninety per cent of the emissions attributed to the twenty major polluters were generated at the final link in the supply chain, where fossil fuels power aircraft, cars and coal-fired power stations. The remaining 10 per cent is linked to extraction, refining and transport. The Guardian contacted all 20 companies, but only 7 responded. Some refuse to consider themselves responsible for the use that has been made of the fuels they extracted; others contest the assumption that their environmental impact was already known at the time.
"The great tragedy of the climate crisis is that 7.5 billion people must pay the price, in the form of a ruined planet, to allow about twenty polluting entities to continue racking up record profits. Allowing all of this to happen is a great moral failure of our political system," said the well-known American climatologist and geophysicist Michael Mann.