No. 2023-03 - Evaluating fossil fuel companies’ alignment with 1.5°C climate pathways

Abstract:

Limiting global average temperature rise to 1.5°C requires an unprecedented reduction in fossil fuel consumption. To track the fossil fuel industry and its individual companies against 1.5°C-consistent pathways, we propose a new methodology that complements existing methodologies in four main ways: it uses publicly available data, the focus is on absolute fossil fuel production (as a proxy for embedded emissions), rather than carbon intensities associated with their use; it includes coal which is commonly excluded; and it is applicable regardless of whether the company has set a target. We evaluate the largest 142 producers of coal, oil, and gas against three 1.5°C IPCC SSP (RCP-1.9) pathways from 2014 and the IEA Net Zero Emissions pathway from 2020. We find that these 142 companies would produce up to 68%, 42%, 53% more than their cumulative production budgets for coal, oil, and gas respectively by 2050 if they continued the trend of their average growth rates from 2010-2018.