178 Fossil Fuel Giants Have Already Locked In Centuries of Warming
The vast majority of planet-warming emissions come from just 178 oil, gas, and cement companies known as the “carbon majors.” Even if these companies stopped emitting tomorrow, the carbon they’ve already spewed into the atmosphere will continue heating the planet for centuries to come. That’s according to a study published today in the journal PLOS Climate. As Earth’s average temperature careens toward 2.7 degrees Fahrenheit (1.5 degrees Celsius) of warming above pre-industrial levels, the findings underscore the urgent need to cut emissions from the carbon majors as quickly as possible.
- ▪The vast majority of planet-warming emissions come from just 178 oil, gas, and cement companies known as the “carbon majors.” Even if these companies stopped emitting tomorrow, the carbon they’ve already spewed into the atmosphere will cont
- ▪That’s according to a study published today in the journal PLOS Climate.
- ▪As Earth’s average temperature careens toward 2.7 degrees Fahrenheit (1.5 degrees Celsius) of warming above pre-industrial levels, the findings underscore the urgent need to cut emissions from the carbon majors as quickly as possible.
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| Original publisher | Gizmodo |
| Canonical URL | https://gizmodo.com/carbon-majors-emissions-warming-centuries-study-2000816020 |
| Publication time | Wed, 23 Sep 2026 18:00:45 +0000 |
| Retrieval time | 2026-09-23T18:04:30.850Z |
| Last seen | 2026-09-23T18:04:30.850Z |
| Headline source | Publisher (no WeSearch rewrite) |
| Excerpt source | publisher body |
| Excerpt method | First ~120 words (~800 chars) of extracted publisher body, fair-use limited. |
| Summary | WeSearch · cerebras-chat (WeSearch summarizer) |
| Summary source text | contentText |
| Citation coverage | Summary is a WeSearch-generated derivative; primary citation is the original publisher URL. |
| Cluster | Ha0d76QJZ1eh · 1 stories |
| Cluster logic | Grouped by semantic title/content similarity across sources within a rolling window. Same-publisher template collisions are excluded from coverage comparison. |
| Ranking reason | Story pages are not engagement-ranked. Hub feeds use recency, with optional source-diversified chronological ordering (cap consecutive stories per source). No personalized ranking. |
| Publisher visit | Yes — open original |
| Substitutes article? | No — link-out required for full text |
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| Indexing | May the item be indexed (stored, ranked, made findable)? | Allowed |
| Snippet | May a short excerpt of the publisher's text be shown? | Allowed |
| AI summary | May WeSearch generate its own short summary of the article? | Limited |
| Retrieval / RAG | May the content be exposed for third-party retrieval-augmented generation? | Not asserted |
| Model training | May the content be used to train AI models? | Not asserted |
| Commercial reuse | May the content be reused commercially? | Not permitted |
Basis: Derived from the published RSS/Atom feed. Contact: [email protected]. Reviewed: 2026-07-24.
Opening excerpt (first ~120 words) tap to expand
The vast majority of planet-warming emissions come from just 178 oil, gas, and cement companies known as the “carbon majors.” Even if these companies stopped emitting tomorrow, the carbon they’ve already spewed into the atmosphere will continue heating the planet for centuries to come. That’s according to a study published today in the journal PLOS Climate. As Earth’s average temperature careens toward 2.7 degrees Fahrenheit (1.5 degrees Celsius) of warming above pre-industrial levels, the findings underscore the urgent need to cut emissions from the carbon majors as quickly as possible. A whopping 50% of these emissions were produced after 1986, when the relationship between greenhouse gases and global warming was already well established.
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Excerpt limited to ~120 words for fair-use compliance. The full article is at Gizmodo.
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