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36 FIRMS DROVE HALF OF WORLD’S CLIMATE-ALTERING GASSES  
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Sharon Kelly
March 5, 2025
DeSmog
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_ Companies and states most responsible for climate change are also
those working hardest to prevent climate action, new Carbon Majors
report finds. _

Hurricane Harvey, downgraded to a tropical storm when it hit Vidor,
Texas, flooded an Exxon gas station, Sept. 1, 2017., Julie Dermansky

 

Half of the world’s carbon dioxide emissions in 2023 came from just
three dozen companies, according to a new report
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released today by the Carbon Majors project, with the list dominated
by coal, cement, and oil producers.

Saudi Arabia’s Saudi Aramco
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the year’s worst offender, drove 4.4 percent of the world’s carbon
dioxide pollution alone in 2023, the report found.

Five publicly-traded oil companies — ExxonMobil, Chevron, Shell,
TotalEnergies, and BP — combined to produce an additional 4.9
percent of the year’s global carbon dioxide emissions from fossil
fuels, the report adds.

The Carbon Majors database [[link removed]] builds on the
innovative work published by researcher Richard Heede of the Climate
Accountability Institute (CAI) begun in 2013. For the first time,
instead of attributing the build-up of industrial carbon dioxide and
methane emissions to each of the world’s nations, Heede managed to
trace those emissions to 90 specific “carbon major” companies
[[link removed]]. Last
year, the nonprofit think tank InfluenceMap collaborated with CAI to
produce major updates
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to the database — and today’s report marks the first annual update
to that report, incorporating global data from 2023.

The year’s top carbon polluters were a mix of investor-owned and
state-owned or national companies — but they have one thing in
common.

“They’re some of the most obstructive actors towards climate
policy,” Emmett Connaire, a senior analyst at the Carbon Majors
project and one of the authors of the report, told DeSmog.

“I think it kind of kills the argument from industry that they’re
not responsible for their CO2 emissions because we need fossil fuels
to grow,” Connaire said, “when they’re the most obstructive and
trying to keep up the demand for their products in the face of the
overwhelming scientific opinion.” 

Eight of the nine public companies most responsible for carbon
emissions in 2023 were “highly active or strategic” in their
climate lobbying, the report notes. And their lobbying efforts took
aim at regulating climate-altering pollution or sought to impede the
energy transition
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Of these 9 companies, 5 score a D or below, indicating unsupportive
positions on climate policy,” the new report finds, citing data from
InfluenceMap’s LobbyMap database [[link removed]],
which grades companies based on
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Paris Agreement. “The remaining 4 score only slightly higher at
C-.”

[Top 10 investor-owned companies: LobbyMap engagement scores.]

InfluenceMap gave climate policy lobbying scores to the top 10
investor-owned companies, all oil, gas, and coal firms. Credit: Carbon
Majors 2025 report
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None of the five top oil companies named in the report immediately
responded to a request for comment from DeSmog.

Investor-owned companies aren’t the only ones actively fighting to
prevent climate action, the Carbon Majors report notes.

“State-owned companies are even more oppositional to climate
regulation globally according to LobbyMap research,” the report
finds, listing Saudi Aramco, Russia’s Gazprom, Mexico’s Pemex, and
China’s CHN Energy among the worst actors.

“The ‘Carbon Majors’ are keeping the world hooked on fossil
fuels with no plans to slow production,” former United Nations
climate chief and Paris Agreement architect Christiana Figueres
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the report. “While states drag their heels on their Paris Agreement
commitments, state-owned companies are dominating global emissions —
ignoring the desperate needs of their citizens.”

A sizable majority — 80 percent — of the year’s 20 worst
offenders are state-owned, the report found.

[The 2025 Carbon Majors report compared the total CO2 emissions and
percentage of total emissions for the top 5 state-owned (Saudi Aramco,
Coal India, CHN Energy, National Iranian Oil, Jinneng Group) and top 5
investor-owned (ExxonMobil, Chevron, Shell, TotalEnergies, BP)
companies in 2023]

State-owned fossil fuel companies dominated global climate emissions
in 2023, compared to public companies, the Carbon Majors report noted.
Credit: Carbon Majors report 2025

Throughout history, responsibility for driving climate change is
concentrated among a strikingly small number of corporations, the
report suggests.

Two-thirds of all fossil fuel and cement emissions worldwide from 1750
through 2023 can be traced to just 181 entities, the report finds,
adding that one-third of emissions came from just 26 companies.

These findings may have significant legal consequences. During 2024,
New York state and Vermont both enacted “Climate Superfund” laws
that aim to hold fossil fuel producers and oil refiners responsible
for the damage done by their climate-altering products — and the
Carbon Majors database is a proposed tool to assess companies’
relative liabilities, according to InfluenceMap. Its earlier findings
have been cited in civil lawsuits brought by U.S. cities
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and counties [[link removed]] against fossil fuel producers
and an inquiry
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in the Philippines (which has seen some of the strongest typhoons in
recorded history) into corporate responsibility for human rights
violations.

The report approaches companies’ contributions to climate change
based on production data —  meaning that it focuses on the
companies that do the drilling and mining (which helps avoid
double-counting, Connaire told DeSmog). Those production figures are
self-reported by companies but are widely used by governments to
assess taxes and by investors in public companies. That methodology
means that, for example, natural gas pipeline companies and natural
gas utilities aren’t included in the report’s rankings. 

Nonetheless, natural gas producers figure among the report’s list of
all-time top polluters. That includes the former Chesapeake Energy,
which first rose to prominence — and some notoriety
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— during the shale gas fracking boom only to implode into bankruptcy
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in 2020. Chesapeake later emerged from bankruptcy and has since merged
into the newly formed Expand Energy.

As the Carbon Majors database traces emissions throughout history, it
accounts for the effects of mergers and acquisitions in the tumultuous
oil industry, known for its booms and busts. “For example, the
multiple smaller companies into which the Standard Oil Trust was
broken up have evolved to become some of the most recognizable
companies in the database today,” the report notes. “Some are
direct descendants of Standard Oil, like ExxonMobil, with both Exxon
and Mobil as descendants separately, and Chevron. Others have resulted
from mergers with descendants of Standard Oil, such as BP and
ConocoPhillips.”

[Top 20 carbon majors entities by emissions, from 1854-2023: Former
Soviet Union (1900-1991), China (Coal, 1945-2004), Saudi Aramco,
Chevron, ExxonMobil, Gazprom, National Iranian Oil Company, BP, Shell,
Coal India, Pemex, China (Cement), Poland (Coal, 1913-2001), CHN
Energy, ConocoPhillips, British Coal Corporation (1947-1994), CNPC,
Abu Dhabi National Oil Company (ADNOC), Peabody Energy, TotalEnergies]

The Carbon Majors database traces the historical cumulative emissions
of the top individual entities, such as Chevron or the former Soviet
Union, from 1854 through 2023. Credit: Carbon Majors report 2025

It also calls attention to the importance of coal pollution — not
just historically, but also in 2023.

“In 2023, coal remained the largest source of emissions,
contributing 41.1 percent of emissions in the database,” the new
report finds, “continuing a steady increase since 2016.”

Emissions from the cement industry — also a major driver of carbon
pollution — increased significantly in 2023, rising 6.5 percent
year-over-year, which the Carbon Majors report noted was “the
largest relative rise” found. “Four of the five companies with the
greatest relative increases in emissions in 2023 were cement companies
— Holcim Group, Heidelberg Materials, UltraTech Cement, and CRH —
with cement emissions seeing the largest relative rise among the four
commodity types.”

Cement producers aren’t the only ones, however. In fact, emissions
from most of the top emitters rose in 2023, the Carbon Majors report
found. 

“It is truly alarming that the largest fossil fuel companies
continue to increase their emissions in the face of worsening natural
disasters caused by climate change, disregarding scientific evidence
that these emissions are harming us all,” said Tzeporah Berman,
founder of the Fossil Fuel Non-Proliferation Treaty Initiative. “It
is clearer than ever that dirty private companies, driven by profits
and business as usual, will never choose to self-regulate. Governments
around the world must use their power to end fossil fuel expansion and
transition their economies before fossil fuel companies destroy the
planet.”

Sharon Kelly is an attorney and investigative reporter based in
Pennsylvania. She was previously a senior correspondent at The Capitol
Forum and, prior to that, she reported for The New York Times, The
Guardian, The Nation, Earth Island Journal, and a variety of other
print and online publications.

DeSmog was founded in January 2006 to clear the PR pollution that is
clouding the science and solutions to climate change. Our team quickly
became the world’s number one source for accurate, fact-based
information regarding global warming misinformation campaigns.

* Climate Change
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* corporate pollution
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