Over half of the world’s carbon dioxide emissions in 2024 came from just 32 fossil fuel companies, according to a new report.
The study, by Carbon Majors, found that Saudi Aramco was the biggest state-controller polluter – responsible for 1.7 billion tonnes of CO2 that year, mostly from oil exports. And ExxonMobil was the largest investor-owned polluter, responsible for 610 million tonnes of CO2.
Most of the top 20 emitters accused of “sabotaging climate action” are state-owned oil, gas, coal and cement producers, the report said, and those 17 countries all objected to a fossil fuel phaseout proposed by 80 countries at the COP30 climate summit in Brazil late last year.
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The top 20 highest carbon-emitting entities in 2024 “were responsible for 18 GtCO2e (gigatons of carbon dioxide equivalent), representing 41.8% of global fossil fuel and cement CO2 emissions in 2024,” the report said.
Chinese, Indian coal giants
“The list is largely dominated by state-owned entities, which account for 16 of the top 20. Notably, eight of the top 20 entities are Chinese. Coal producers are particularly prominent, with seven represented, six from China and one from India, underscoring Asia’s continued dependence on coal.”
According to the European Union’s Copernicus Climate Change Service, 2024 was the first calendar year in which the global average temperature exceeded 1.5C above pre-industrial levels (1850-1900).
And that was a stark warning of the urgent need for climate action, it said.
Global emissions have been rising since the Covid pandemic, and while the world is no longer expected to keep global warming under the 1.5C level sought under the Paris Agreement, scientists say limiting global heating by even fractions of a degree is still important to reduce climate impacts on communities all across the planet.
The latest report shows that emissions are concentrated among a shrinking group of global emitters from states such as Saudi Arabia, Russia, China, Iran, the United Arab Emirates and India, plus a powerful group of fossil fuel corporations.
Legal claims
But the Carbon Majors report also warned that emissions data that it and scientists collect is now regularly being used in legal claims against these state-owned and private entities and that courts around the world have been increasingly sympathetic to such findings.
The Carbon Majors database was used in recent analysis that directly linked carbon emissions from the world’s biggest fossil fuel companies to dozens of deadly heatwaves.
The data also led to another study published by the Nature last year that said trillions of dollars in economic losses stemming from extreme heat could be attributed to individual fossil fuel companies.
At least 226 new climate cases were filed in 2024, according to the Grantham Institute’s Global Trends in Climate Change Litigation: 2025 Snapshot, and 20% of these cases now target corporations, it said.
Notably, the report said that “cases against corporate defendants appear to have a higher overall success rate compared to non-corporate defendants, underscoring the growing viability of corporate climate litigation as a strategy.”
NOTE: Additional text was added to this report on January 22, 2026.
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