Hello and welcome to more or less on the BBC World Service with a programme that gets down

with data and nifty with numbers and I'm Tim Halford.

As you all know, the planet is hotting up and we're constantly being told to do our bit

to reduce greenhouse gas emissions. Many of us are trying to make little changes, switching

off lights, cycling instead of driving, not flying first class around the world and back,

but all these little changes can seem futile and you're faced with claims such as this.

Just 100 companies are responsible for 71% of global carbon emissions.

This clip is old. It's from 2018 which was said, gosh, four years ago, time flies when

you're hiding under a duvet, but it's a claim that pops up everywhere and is still regularly

used in various social media battles and think pieces. But does the statistic mean

what we think it means? To find out, we contacted our false-fact fighting

compatriots, full-fact. We spoke to their assistant editor, Abbas Pindwani.

So this claim's been being around for quite a number of years. It originated in a report

published in 2017, so five years ago now by an organisation called the Carbon Disclosure

Project and they looked at how much emissions could be ascribed to different organisations

and states. The report contains the type of fossil fuel companies you'd expect to see.

Shell, BP, Exxon, China, China?

Yes, so this figure looks at the period between 1988 and 2015 and it includes lots of state-owned

companies but actually groups them together as states. So the first of these companies

responsible for global emissions is actually not a company at all but just China as a country

which states owns lots of fossil fuel extraction companies, high up in the list or also Russia

just as a country and then specific state-owned entities like the Saudi Arabia or a company

...