Greenpeace USA unveils giant “bill” with the economic damages brought on by five major oil and gas companies at NYC Climate Week

NEW YORK, NEW YORK (September 20, 2025)—Greenpeace USA activists deployed a giant “Climate Polluters Bill” nearly 160 feet long — the length of an Olympic swimming pool — through midtown Manhattan today, while marching in a mass demonstration during Climate Week NYC and on the eve of the UN General Assembly and the UN Secretary General’s Climate Ambition Summit.[1] 

Photos of the giant bill and the march will be available later this afternoon in the Greenpeace Media Library. 

The bill reveals that — over just the last 10 years and only accounting for the climate pollution from five major oil and gas companies — the projected economic damage is over $5 trillion USD, according to leading experts on the social cost of carbon (SCC).[2]

Greenpeace USA Executive Director, Sushma Raman, said: “Communities and families are losing their homes, schools, and livelihoods, while Big Oil billionaires are raking in astronomical profits. They want to cast off any liability for their actions, and push the rising costs of the damage they’ve inflicted onto working class families. A small handful of oil and gas companies are impacting people now and in the future to the score of more than $5 trillion. Their climate bill is long overdue, and it is time they pay up.”

The new analysis finds that in the 10 years since nations signed the Paris Climate Agreement (2016-2025), emissions from a small handful of the world’s largest investor-owned fossil fuel companies are projected to amount to $5.36 trillion in damages from climate fueled disasters including wildfires, floods, hurricanes, heatwaves and drought — with costs that are already impacting people and expected to continue well into the future.[2] 

The giant bill carried by dozens of activists in the NYC march also highlights some of the most extreme weather events to hit the world over the past decade.[3] These types of extreme weather are becoming more frequent and severe due to emissions from the global fossil fuel industry. In the past 10 years, the world has experienced the 10 warmest years on record,[4] while at the same time ExxonMobil, Chevron, Shell, BP and TotalEnergies alone reported profits of almost $800 billion.[5] 

Greenpeace International Executive Director, Mads Christensen, said: “No one is safe from deadly heatwaves, wildfires, toxic air, and rising seas. Yet those most sheltered from the crisis — the super-rich and oil and gas giants — keep profiting while the rest of us pay the price. It’s time to flip the script: governments must make polluters pay and use that money to fund a secure, green future. World leaders have a historic chance at COP30 and in negotiations for a UN Global Tax Convention to close the climate finance gap and to raise billions to protect people and the planet. We demand a new polluter tax on the global profits of oil and gas corporations, alongside taxing wealthy elites and addressing illicit financial flows.”

Greenpeace, along with 250,000 individuals and over 60 other organizations around the world, supports the Polluters Pay Pact, which demands that world leaders make oil, coal and gas corporations pay their fair share of climate damages.

Notes:

Photos and videos from the mass ‘Draw the Line’ demonstration in NYC available on the Greenpeace Media library. 

[1] Draw the Line is a global week of events starting on September 15, leading up to a weekend of actions between September 19-21.

[2] The quantification of economic damages since 2015 was provided to Greenpeace International by Prof. James Rising of the University of Delaware and Dr. Lisa Rennels of Stanford University. The analysis, which is available here, uses data from the Carbon Majors Database and the SCC methodology. The SCC was used by former US administrations and policy analysts to assign a dollar value to future damages from an additional ton of CO₂ between the year of its emissions through to the year 2300.

Emissions data for the oil and gas companies was extracted from the Carbon Majors Database, which in turn sources emissions data from publicly available company reports.

[3] The giant bill is populated with a selection of some of the most expensive and notable extreme weather events since the Paris Agreement was adopted. These are sourced from the International Disaster Database EM-DAT. In this case they are noted for representative purposes only and not as part of the social cost of carbon calculation. 

[4] WMO confirms 2024 as warmest year on record at about 1.55°C above pre-industrial level

[5] Calculations for reported profits between 2016 and first half of 2025, for ExxonMobil, Chevron, BP, Shell, TotalEnergies, can be seen here. Data originally sourced from company reporting.

Greenpeace USA is part of a global network of independent campaigning organizations that use peaceful protest and creative communication to expose global environmental problems and promote solutions that are essential to a green and peaceful future. Greenpeace USA is committed to transforming the country’s unjust social, environmental, and economic systems from the ground up to address the climate crisis, advance racial justice, and build an economy that puts people first. Learn more at www.greenpeace.org/usa.