Climate change presents an immediate and serious threat to the health, prosperity, and stability of all of human civilization, as well as to the health, stability and existence of our entire biosphere. The climate change that we are witnessing today is primarily driven by historic emissions. The parties responsible for the dominant sources of historic emissions are not necessarily the same as those responsible for the dominant share of today’s emissions. For the first time a report has identified the 90 industries, countries and nationally owned operations that have profited from global warming. The research, published in 2014, traces sources of industrial CO2 and methane to the 90 largest corporate investor-owned and state-owned producers of fossil fuels and cement from as early as 1854 to 2010. If the world is going to demand economic justice, then this data is important because most current studies have taken a broad brush view of emissions by country. NOAA has calculated the cost of weather and climate billion-dollar disasters to affect the U.S. from 1980-2015 (CPI-Adjusted). It’s a lot of moolah! I do not believe that the taxpayer should foot the bill for these neverending greenhouse gas emissions assaulting all areas on earth.
Carbon Majors summarizes the findings.
In many cases, multinational companies have extracted more than most countries. The top ten carbon majors include ChevronTexaco, Exxon-Mobil, BP and Royal Dutch Shell, along with government-run industries in the former USSR, China and Poland, as well as the nationally owned Saudi Aramco, Gazprom and the National Iranian Oil Company.
Investor owned entities comprised 315 gigatonnes of carbon dioxide equivalent, while government-run industries, contributed 312 gigatonnes. State-owned companies produced 288 gigatonnes.
The largest investor-owned producers weigh heavily in the analysis. The top 20 produced fuels that comprised 29.5 percent of emissions, while the top 10 account for 15.8 percent. Five ‘oil majors,’ ChevronTexaco, ExxonMobil, BP, Shell, and ConocoPhillips account for a total of 181 gigatonnes of carbon dioxide over the past 130 years, amounting to 12.5 percent of total carbon emitted to the atmosphere.
Most of the top producers primarily extract oil. Coal producers Coal India and Peabody Energy rank eleventh and twelfth, respectively. The list also includes a handful of cement producers.
Political Economy Research Institute provides a table of the top 100 corporations of greenhouse gas emitters in 2014.