About Carbon Majors......Carbon Majors is a database of historical production data from 178 of the world’s largest oil, gas, coal, and cement producers. This data is used to quantify the direct operational emissions and emissions from the combustion of marketed products that can be attributed to these entities. These entities include:100 Investor-owned Companies, 72 State-owned Companies, 6 Nation States, 85 Oil Producing Entities, 86 Gas Entities, 104 Coal Entities, 8 Cement Entities The data spans back to 1854 and contains over 1.44 trillion tonnes of CO2e covering 70% of global fossil fuel and cement emissions since the start of the Industrial Revolution in 1751. 

Carbon Majors & Global Fossil Fuel and Cement Emissions, 1854 - 2024 This graph shows the carbon dioxide emissions traced to the carbon fuels and cement produced by the top 20 companies in Carbon Majors and compares them to total global fossil fuel and cement emissions.    https://carbonmajors.org/   

There is no doubt that oil, gas and coal companies already bear a disproportionate share of the blame yet have a financial incentive to further disrupt the climate. These perverse incentives will continue unless their generous government subsidies are replaced with windfall taxes. There is an overwhelming scientific consensus that the more fossil fuels are burned, the hotter the planet will get. The latest attribution study concludes that the “most severe and widespread heatwave to have ever affected this large a region of Europe” could not have happened without human-caused climate change. Yet Big Oil is planning to make a bad situation worse, because more fuel burning means bigger bucks. A recent surge in profits, thanks to high oil prices driven by wars in the Middle East, including Iran, is going to be followed by a splurge in investment in new wells.A new analysis shows petroleum companies are racing one another to extract more oil and gas from the ground. Shell, ExxonMobil, Chevron and seven other publicly listed firms aim, on average, to increase production by 14% between 2024 and 2030, according to the TPI Global Climate Transition Centre at the London School of Economics and Political Science (LSE).

More fuel is the last thing an already overheated world needs. It pushes the planet in the opposite direction from the goals set by the Paris climate agreement, to which many of these companies promised to align themselves. To limit global heating to between 1.5C and 2C by 2100, oil output needs to fall this decade. The current planned expansion is much worse than the International Energy Agency’s gloomy business-as-usual scenario, which envisages a 5.9% increase in oil and gas production this decade, leading to a catastrophic 2.9C global temperature increase by the end of the century.......read on  https://www.theguardian.com/environment/2026/jul/07/big-oil-companies-profiting-fossil-fuel-global-climate-change 

Trump Offers Funds for First New U.S. Coal Plants in 13 Years.NY Times Maxine Joselow and Brad Plumer June 4, 2026 The president announced a total of $700 million in federal money to reinvigorate the domestic coal industry, which has been in decline for decades. President Trump on Thursday announced $700 million in new federal funding for the country’s struggling coal industry, including money that would help build the first two new coal-burning power plants in the United States in more than a decade. It was the latest in a series of extraordinary efforts by his administration to improve the fortunes of coal, the most polluting of the fossil fuels and a favored industry of the president’s.  In recent months, the Energy Department has to stay open instead of shutting down as planned. And Mr. Trump has directed the Defense Department to buy more electricity from coal plants to power military installations nationwide.  

The biggest worry for scientists is that further heating could trigger irreversible tipping points, such as the widespread drying out and dying off of the Amazon, or the melting of the Greenland ice sheet, beyond which climate breakdown could spiral out of control. For the UN, and the world, minimising and, if possible, reversing that “overshoot” must now be the priority. But shifting the world’s energy systems to burn less fossil fuel is taking decades, time we no longer have to spare. Some scientists believe the answer lies elsewhere: with the powerful greenhouse gas, methane.

“Cutting methane is the single most important strategy to slow near-term warming,” says Durwood Zaelke, the president of the Institute for Governance and Sustainable Development, and a longtime advocate of action on methane. “In fact, it’s the only strategy that has a chance of working. Cutting carbon dioxide is a marathon, but methane is a sprint.”Methane, the main component of the natural gas that is burned around the world for fuel, is produced by natural and human-made processes, including leaky oil and gas infrastructure, livestock, and the rotting of organic material. Once in the atmosphere, it is about 80 times more powerful in trapping heat than carbon dioxide, but has a shorter life, breaking down in about 20 years.

Scientists estimate that methane alone has driven at least a third of the warming in recent years. New satellites and detection systems have revealed an unexpected truth: many countries have been massively underreporting their methane emissions, and the quantities of the gas being poured into the atmosphere have been climbing strongly, even while carbon dioxide output has been slowing.

Cutting methane would give the planet essential breathing space, staving off the worst consequences of climate breakdown while the transition to a clean energy future gathers pace. Global temperature rises could be held down by about 0.3C in the next decade with a 40% cut in methane, or by as much as 0.5C by 2050 with further cuts. If the world is to minimise the overshoot of the threshold of 1.5C above preindustrial levels, action on methane is indispensable. “It’s the rocket in the pocket,” says Paul Bledsoe, a former Clinton White House climate adviser. “It’s effective and it’s cheap to reduce methane – two-thirds of the reductions needed from the energy sector could be done at zero net cost.”

A paper published in October in the peer-review journal Science found that substantial cuts to methane could delay key tipping points: it could reduce the likelihood of the Amazon rainforest dying back by about 8%, and of disruption to the Indian monsoon by about 13%.The study also found that reducing methane paid for itself three times over – or six times over if health benefits were included. Cutting methane by a third by 2030 would be worth about $1tn a year for the global economy. Simon Dietz, a professor at the London School of Economics who cowrote the study, says: “The benefits of global methane action look so much larger than the costs that the economic case for action is clear. [It is] not only feasible but also economically compelling.”.....read on     https://www.theguardian.com/environment/2025/nov/16/methane-cuts-climate-breakdown-cop30