Half of world’s CO2 emissions come from just 32 fossil fuel firms

[Graeme Taylor]

FYI:
https://www.theguardian.com/environment/2026/jan/21/carbon-dioxide-co2-emissions-fossil-fuel-firms-study

[Ron Baiman]

Thanks for sharing Graeme!  Eye opening indeed!

This little snippet I think highlights part of the problem esp for low income countries that are highly dependent on fossil fuel exports:

“State-owned fossil fuel producers made up 17 of the top 20 emitters in the Carbon Majorsreport, which the authors said underscored the political barriers to tackling global heating. All 17 are controlled by countries that opposed a proposed fossil fuel phaseout at the Cop30 UN climate summit in December, including Saudi Arabia, Russia, China, Iran, the United Arab Emirates and India.”

The problem of course is that no national leader who wants to stay in power can afford to effectively immiserate her/his constituents (at least in the short term) on the alter of comabating "global climate change". The only large successful programs for transfering funding for emissions reduction and drawdown from positive emitters to zero or negative emitting projects as far as I know are the EU cap and trade  (there are many others in places including CA and other US states but not nearly as large or long standing) supplemented by carbon taxes sytstem, and it seems the Chinese "Marshall Plan on steroids" as described in earlier HPAC posts on Adam Tooze's writings. Alaas the Kyoto Protocol (that transfered over $300 B through its "clean development mechanism") was suspended and only continued in the EU.  So now I think mostly the EU, market forces and China are driving us forward but of course much too slowly to prevent catastrophe witout near-term global intervention. 

For more on this see section 4 of this: https://drive.google.com/file/d/1WNrZbVd17gRR9Fz8gaEt7BXzR-ZOrvzI/view?usp=sharing

and 5.3 of this: https://drive.google.com/file/d/1O4-xMSxxr3otWu0Qx-BZwSFtzvZKfkA5/view?usp=sharing

and last paragraph before "Conclusions" section of this: https://drive.google.com/file/d/1O4-xMSxxr3otWu0Qx-BZwSFtzvZKfkA5/view?usp=sharing

Best,

Ron

Sent from my iPhone

On Jan 21, 2026, at 3:23 AM, Graeme Taylor <gra...@bestfutures.org> wrote:

FYI: https://www.theguardian.com/environment/2026/jan/21/carbon-dioxide-co2-emissions-fossil-fuel-firms-study

--
You received this message because you are subscribed to the Google Groups "Healthy Planet Action Coalition (HPAC)" group.
To unsubscribe from this group and stop receiving emails from it, send an email to healthy-planet-action...@googlegroups.com.
To view this discussion visit https://groups.google.com/d/msgid/healthy-planet-action-coalition/7b9bcdb3-753b-4aa6-bab9-8f8d9512aa2d%40bestfutures.org.