These 100 Companies Are to Blame For 71% of The World's Greenhouse Gas Emissions

Typography

Since 1988, a mere 100 companies have been responsible for 71 percent of the entire world's industrial greenhouse gas emissions.

This data comes from an inaugural report published by the Carbon Disclosure Project (CDP), an environmental non-profit. Charting the rapid expansion of the fossil fuel industry in the last 28 years, they have now released some truly staggering numbers on the world's major carbon polluters.

Greenhouse gas (GHG) emissions are typically assessed by country, with China, the US and India ranking as the top emissions producers in the world. But the new CDP report takes a different approach, tracing emissions back to specific entities it dubs 'carbon majors'.

The report focusses on carbon and methane emissions from industrial activity by fossil fuel producers, accounting for a whopping 923 billion tonnes of carbon dioxide-equivalent emissions since 1988, the year when the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change was established.

If it sounds like a lot, that's because it really is a huge amount. In fact, it's more than half of all global industrial GHG emissions since the beginning of the Industrial Revolution in 1751, according to the report.

What's even more crazy is the fact that a mere 25 corporate and state-owned entities have produced over half of all industrial emissions in the time period between 1988 and 2015.

Read more at Science Alert

Photo Credit:  Leonid Ikan/Shutterstock