In a damning revelation, a new report has exposed that just 32 fossil fuel companies were responsible for a staggering 50% of the world’s carbon dioxide emissions driving the climate crisis in 2024. This figure represents a slight decrease from the previous year’s 36 top emitters, but the scale of the problem remains alarming.
Saudi Aramco, the state-owned oil giant, was the biggest state-controlled polluter, while ExxonMobil topped the list of investor-owned companies. Critics have accused these leading fossil fuel firms of “sabotaging climate action” and being “on the wrong side of history,” but they say the emissions data is increasingly being used to hold the companies accountable.
The Carbon Majors report, which the authors say underscores the political barriers to tackling global heating, found that state-owned fossil fuel producers made up 17 of the top 20 emitters. All 17 are controlled by countries that opposed a proposed fossil fuel phaseout at the COP30 UN climate summit in December, including Saudi Arabia, Russia, China, Iran, the United Arab Emirates, and India. More than 80 other nations had backed the phaseout plan.
Saudi Aramco was responsible for 1.7 billion tonnes of CO2, much of it from exported oil. If it were a country, Aramco would be the world’s fifth-biggest carbon polluter, just behind Russia. ExxonMobil’s fossil fuel production led to 610 million tonnes of CO2 – it would be the ninth-biggest polluter, ahead of South Korea.
Emmett Connaire, of the think tank InfluenceMap, who led the report, said: “Each year, global emissions become increasingly concentrated among a shrinking group of high-emitting producers, while overall production continues to grow.”
Tzeporah Berman, of the Fossil Fuel Non-Proliferation Treaty Initiative, said: “This latest analysis reinforces a stark reality: a powerful, concentrated group of fossil fuel corporations are not only dominating global emissions but are actively sabotaging climate action and weakening government ambition.”
Christiana Figueres, a former UN climate chief, said: “The latest Carbon Majors data shows once again that large emitters are on the wrong side of history. While clean energy and electrification is already receiving nearly twice the investment of fossil fuels globally, carbon majors are clinging on to outdated, polluting products.”
The Carbon Majors database has also provided crucial evidence in legal cases, such as Lliuya v RWE, a landmark German climate litigation case, and climate superfund laws in New York and Vermont that require large fossil fuel companies to pay for projects to protect citizens against climate impacts such as flooding and extreme heat.
