Which businesses are the world's biggest polluters?

Disclosure on this subject is still patchy, so we went through dozens of annual reports to show the 63 companies that account for 2/3 of the world's fossil fuel emissions:

https://www.bloomberg.com/graphics/2020-opinion-climate-global-biggest-polluters-scope-3-emissions-disclosures/?sref=5JzLFdzD

These are so-called Scope 3 emissions, and for mining and petroleum companies they're the vast majority of their emissions -- the CO2 that enters the atmosphere when their products are used.

But measuring them is an emerging and inexact field.

https://www.bloomberg.com/opinion/articles/2020-03-14/zero-emissions-targets-challenge-miners-oil-majors?sref=5JzLFdzD

To take one recent example of how companies are just getting to grips with this data, Campbell's Soup recently claimed in their disclosures to account for ~14% of the world's carbon emissions. They'd got the number out by a factor of 1,000: https://twitter.com/davidfickling/status/1299169230454059008

And some companies just don't report the numbers at all.

Exxon Mobil gives a wordy explanation that they don't report Scope 3 because it's none of their business whether their customers burn their petroleum or, I dunno, bathe in it?

https://corporate.exxonmobil.com/-/media/Global/Files/energy-and-carbon-summary/Energy-and-carbon-summary.pdf

They can save some words in the next report because we've done the numbers. The figure is roughly 528 million tons of CO2-equivalent, more or less the emissions of Indonesia or Mexico.

Mining companies are also a large, and underappreciated source of emissions -- with iron ore arguably a bigger deal than coal, at least among listed companies:

The biggest figures are the titans of coal, oil, and gas -- Coal India, Saudi Aramco, and Gazprom -- each accounting for a Japan-sized carbon footprint of more than 1bn tonnes of CO2 per year:

And let's not forget the unlisted national oil companies, which account for a huge slice of emissions but mostly don't report Scope 3, or financial data or even production numbers (we estimated their numbers based on BP's Statistical Review of Energy):

The key thing to remember is that these numbers aren't actually all that hard to calculate using standard emissions factors and production data.

Most of our numbers are pretty close to the company-reported data even though we used a very basic spreadsheet model.

So companies shouldn't hide the figures. As always in finance, failure to publicize risks doesn't make the risks go away. Shareholders and lenders need to demand better disclosure, so that they know the risks they're taking on. (ends) https://www.bloomberg.com/graphics/2020-opinion-climate-global-biggest-polluters-scope-3-emissions-disclosures/?sref=5JzLFdzD