How Much Money Does ExxonMobil, Berkshire Hathaway & America’s Other Top Polluters Make?

America’s biggest polluters are mostly companies that run power plants. The main exceptions are a few oil and gas companies, a steelmaker, and one conglomerate with utility and pipeline holdings.

We measure greenhouse gas pollution in carbon dioxide equivalent (CO2e). ClimatePartner defines it this way: “By converting different emissions to the equivalent amount of carbon dioxide (CO2), their impacts can be compared.”

The EPA’s Greenhouse Gas Reporting Program (GHGRP) is the primary source for this data, but it reports emissions by facility, not by owner. To fill that gap, researchers at the University of Massachusetts Amherst’s Political Economy Research Institute matched each site to the corporation that owns it. The U.S. government ranked eighth in that analysis, but we removed it so the list covers companies only.

The top 15 companies on our list released 715 million metric tons of CO2e in 2023, more than 10% of all U.S. greenhouse gas emissions.

The analysis has some limitations:

• Revenue and emissions don’t match geographically. Revenue figures, taken from each company’s annual report, cover worldwide operations, while the emissions data covers the U.S. only. The per-dollar figures should be read with that in mind.
• One company is private. Energy Capital Partners has no public revenue figure, though it appears on several lists of the most valuable private companies.
• Only direct emissions are counted. The figures cover emissions from the companies’ own operations, not from the products they sell. For example, emissions from burning the gasoline that ExxonMobil sells are not included.

The 15 companies that do the most damage to the U.S. climate

Rank	Company	2023 U.S. emissions (million metric tons CO2e)	2025 revenue	Tons per $1M revenue	Main source
1	Vistra Energy	86.3	$17.7B	4,866	Power plants
2	Southern Co.	76.3	$29.6B	2,583	Power plants
3	Duke Energy	73.7	$32.2B	2,287	Power plants
4	Energy Capital Partners	68.0	Private	n/a	Power plants (Calpine)
5	Berkshire Hathaway	59.7	$371.4B	161	Utilities, pipelines
6	American Electric Power	49.9	$21.9B	2,280	Power plants
7	ExxonMobil	41.7	$323.9B	129	Refineries, oil and gas
8	NextEra Energy	41.0	$27.4B	1,495	Power plants
9	Xcel Energy	39.3	$14.7B	2,676	Power plants
10	Entergy	37.1	$13.0B	2,867	Power plants
11	Phillips 66	30.0	$132.4B	227	Refineries
12	Dominion Energy	29.4	$16.5B	1,782	Power plants
13	Marathon Petroleum	28.5	$132.7B	215	Refineries
14	Cleveland-Cliffs	27.4	$18.6B	1,475	Steel mills
15	PPL Corp.	26.9	$9.0B	2,978	Power plants

More from ClimateCrisis 247

• Tesla Models With Largest Sales Decline
• 10 US Cities Where Voters Overwhelmingly Rejected Data Centers
• Hurricane Season Ends In Three Weeks. Why Was It Quieter than Normal?
• 15 US Cities Where Floods Have Caused The Most Damage