Just 111 of the world’s biggest companies are causing $28 trillion worth of climate damage, says study
Just 111 of the world’s largest fossil fuel companies are collectively responsible for an estimated $28 trillion in climate-related economic damage, and just ten of those companies are responsible for half of that total, a study published in Nature found.
Researchers from Dartmouth College used emissions data and economic modelling to calculate the costs of extreme heat attributable to individual companies since 1990. The findings, based on peer-reviewed attribution methods and empirical climate economics, provide new tools in the effort to hold corporations financially liable for global warming and the ecological damage it causes.
“Here we detail the scientific and legal implications of an ‘end-to-end’ attribution that links fossil fuel producers to specific damages from warming,” the researchers wrote. “Using scope 1 and 3 emissions data from major fossil fuel companies, peer-reviewed attribution methods and advances in empirical climate economics, we illustrate the trillions in economic losses attributable to the extreme heat caused by emissions from individual companies.”
The cost of the damage done by ignoring the Climate Crisis vastly outweighs the amount of money being invested into the green transformation and efforts to reduce emissions. According to the most recent estimates, some $1.8-$2 trillion is being invested annually in containing the Climate Crisis, according to BloombergNEF’s Energy Transition Investment Trends 2024 report. Renewable energy alone attracted about $660bn, while electric vehicles and charging infrastructure received $634bn.
IEA (International Energy Agency) recently estimated that a record $3.3 trillion will be invested into global energy in 2025 with about two thirds of that going into green energy generation capacity: solar, wind, grids, energy efficiency and low-emission technologies.
But this money has been ineffective against the damage caused by the world’s biggest energy companies that have sent emissions soaring to new all-time record highs and the pace of growth is still accelerating. Experts have already warned of “cascading” climate tipping points appearing after seven of the nine crucial thresholds have already been breached. The last COP29 climate meeting concluded that all the climate crisis warning lights flashing red and all the evidence points to the ongoing use of fossil fuels are the main culprit. The United Nations’ Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) has already concluded that the 1.5C-2C Paris Agreement target increases above the pre-industrial benchmark have been missed and the world is on course for a catastrophic 2.7C-3.1C increase in temperatures.
Who are the bad guys?
The study named names and identified several household names amongst them. Russia’s state-owned gas champion Gazprom and the Kingdom of Saudi Arabia’s oil and gas giant Saudi Aramco were named as the single two largest contributors to climate damage, each responsible for more than $2 trillion in economic losses due to heat, or around a fifth of the total, by themselves.
Other major emitters outed by the reports included Chevron, BP, Shell, ExxonMobil, Pemex, Coal India, the British Coal Corporation and the National Iranian Oil Co., each of which is reportedly responsible for more than $500bn in economic losses.
According to the analysis, each 1% of global greenhouse gas (GHG) emissions released since 1990 has led to $502bn in heat-related economic harm. The $28 trillion estimate does not include damages from floods, droughts or hurricanes.
Lead author Christopher Callahan of Stanford University said the research aimed to clarify the “causal linkages that underlie many of these theories of accountability” in global climate liability efforts. “Drawing quantitative linkages between individual emitters and particularised harms is now feasible, making science no longer an obstacle to the justiciability of climate liability claims,” Callahan said.
The team traced emissions back 137 years using data on fossil fuel combustion, then ran 1,000 simulations comparing current warming to a baseline world without emissions. For instance, they found Chevron’s historical pollution had raised global surface temperatures by 0.25C.
They also used 80 additional simulations to estimate how individual companies contributed to the planet’s five hottest days, applying a formula that linked extreme heat intensity to fluctuations in economic output.
“This study really laid clear how the veil of plausible deniability doesn’t exist anymore scientifically. We can actually trace harms back to major emitters,” said co-author Justin Mankin, a climate scientist at Dartmouth.
As the damage caused by climate changes become more visible as the annual disaster seasons get underway, and the damage of the storms, flooding and drought starts to run into the billions of dollars, Zero Carbon Analytics reports that 68 climate damage lawsuits have been filed worldwide, more than half in the United States. Insurance companies are also reassessing their business models and the scale and volumes of climate related damage starts to balloon.
According to Swiss Re, one of the world’s largest reinsurance companies, global insured losses from natural catastrophes totalled $108bn in 2023, of which a large proportion was climate-related. This figure follows $125bn in 2022 and $121bn in 2021, keeping annual payouts above the $100bn pre-Climate Crisis norm for four consecutive years. The Insurance Information Institute reported that the number of weather related billion-dollar disasters quintupled to 25 compared to just six two decades earlier. The companies are raising premiums and some are withdrawing products like hurricane coverage completely. The Swiss Re Institute forecasts that climate-related insured losses could reach $1.6 trillion globally between 2020 and 2030, and annual losses exceeding $200bn by the end of the decade under current warming trends.
“Everybody’s asking the same question: What can we actually claim about who has caused this?” said Mankin. “And that really comes down to a thermodynamic question of can we trace climate hazards and/or their damages back to particular emitters?” He added: “The answer is yes.”
Global North responsible for 86% of cumulative emissions
While the largest companies in oil-rich countries like Russia and KSA individually cause the most damage, it is the collective Global North countries that are responsible for 86% of cumulative emissions, in excess of the safe planetary boundary, according to a separate report by Global Inequality based on research that first appeared in The Lancet. The two biggest contributors to excess emissions are the United States (38%) and the EU-28 (28%).
China is the biggest emitter of GHG in absolute terms, but responsible for only 1% of the total cumulative emissions since industrial revolution times. The rest of the South Global and peripheral Europe is responsible for another 13%, according to the “carbon budget” calculation set up by the 2015 Paris Agreement. The shares are calculated from taking the safe carbon budget and dividing it into national "fair shares" on a per-capita basis, and then assessing national emissions against national fair-shares.
The carbon budgets allotted in Paris take into account the historical accountability for emissions. As Europe and the US have been adding to the CO₂ emissions since the start of the industrial revolution, they bear the lion’s share for today’s climate problems, whereas countries like China and India have only industrialised relatively recently and so have contributed much less, which is reflected in their carbon budgets.
As reported by bne IntelliNews, although in terms of nominal volumes, China remains the largest emitter, followed by the US and India, in terms of their allotted carbon budgets of what they can emit and still hit the Paris targets of holding temperature rises to 1.5C, both China and India remain comfortably within their allotted budgets. Indeed, it appears that China, the global green energy champion, has already passed peak emissions a decade earlier than planned. India has also embraced renewables as the cheapest form of power available.
The US by contrast, has ignored its budget and “spent” twice as much emissions as it was allotted under the Paris Agreements. Under US President Donald Trump’s “drill, baby, drill” policies of expanding oil and gas production, that deficit will only grow even larger.
“The Global South as a group is actually still within its fair share of the planetary boundary (350 ppm), since the few "overshooting" countries are compensated for by "undershooting" countries,” Jason Hickel, Professor at ICTA-UAB and Visiting Senior Fellow at LSE said in a social media blog.
The worst is yet to come
While the Dartmouth report estimates that the top companies are responsible for $28 trillion worth of damage this year, that total will increase to $38 trillion by 2050 according to another study by Germany’s Potsdam Institute for Climate Impact Research (PIK) published in Nature last year, affecting most the countries that have contributed the least to climate change.
“Our study highlights the considerable inequity of climate impacts: We find damages almost everywhere, but countries in the tropics will suffer the most because they are already warmer. Further temperature increases will therefore be most harmful there. The countries least responsible for climate change are predicted to suffer income loss that is 60% greater than the higher-income countries and 40% greater than higher-emission countries. They are also the ones with the least resources to adapt to its impacts,” said co-author of the study Anders Levermann, PIK’s head of research department complexity science, as cited by EcoWatch.
The authors said that without mitigating climate change the economic damage will only become worse in the second half of this century, amounting to up to 60% on global average by 2100 – and that is without even considering non-economic impacts such as loss of life or biodiversity, co-author Leonie Wenz said in the report. Incomes will fall by an estimated median of 19% in just the next 25 years, the study found.
Strong income reductions are projected for the majority of regions, including North America and Europe, with South Asia and Africa being most strongly affected, the study found. These are caused by the impact of climate change on economic growth inputs such as agricultural yields, labour productivity and damage to infrastructure.
The research published in the Lancet came to the same conclusion: the countries that have contributed the least to emissions are going to be affected the most by global warming. Two maps that show those who are overshooting their emission targets caps are amongst the least affected by warmer temperatures and visa versa.
With a 2.7C temperature increase by 2050 – current the best-case scenario – an estimated 2bn people will be exposed to extreme temperature that will push the limits of what humans can survive and indeed go beyond those limits. Of these 2bn people exposed to these conditions, 99.7% of them are in the Global South.
