The world’s biggest oil companies handed executives nearly £15 million in bonuses for hitting climate targets last year despite continuing to pump fossil fuels, Andrew Kersley reported for UK’s openDemocracy.

Photo Insert: BP awarded its executives – including CEO Bernard Looney – a bonus for reducing the company’s in-house CO2 emissions by seven million tons.
Not one of the “Big Six”’ – US firms Chevron and ExxonMobil, UK-based Shell and BP, Italian company Eni, and France’s Total – failed to pay out the bonuses, which related to combating climate change and transitioning to greener energy.
The companies made a combined profit last year of hundreds of billions of pounds.
Think tank Common Wealth warned that Chevron, ExxonMobil, and Total are the “biggest offenders when it comes to doubling down on oil and gas production”, and accused all six of setting easily met sustainability targets that failed to acknowledge “the urgency of the climate crisis.”
Analysis by financial think tank Carbon Tracker in December found BP was the only fossil fuel company planning to cut back on oil and gas production by 2030, and even that target has now been scaled back from a 40% reduction to a 25% reduction.
In November, German NGO Urgewald warned that oil and gas companies’ plans for a “frightening” expansion of fossil fuel projects would result in 115 billion tons of CO2 being pumped out – equivalent to more than 24 years of US emissions.
BP awarded its executives – including CEO Bernard Looney – a bonus for reducing the company’s in-house CO2 emissions by seven million tons.
Although that target was achieved, it was almost exactly counterbalanced by an increase in the amount of CO2 emissions from the burning of the fossil fuels BP sells, meaning the firm’s emissions were almost identical in 2021 and 2022 (340 million tons of CO2).
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