Fossil fuel expansion
Since at least 2011, scientists have warned that the world had discovered more fossil fuels than can safely be burned. By 2021, new fossil fuel projects were declared to be incompatible with the Paris warming target—and that most known reserves must stay in the ground to ensure a safe transition and avoid human rights harms. Yet Elsevier still informs the fossil fuel industry's development of new resources, avoiding its UNGP human rights obligations.
Elsevier publications—some staffed by employees of Exxon, Chevron, and other oil majors that are a threat to human rights—provide data and technical resources that enable customers to analyze resource potential, inform exploration, and develop new reservoirs in the remaining frontiers for oil and gas exploration. Elsevier also remains willing to publish content that undermines established science by declaring “rapid decarbonization” is “unnecessary” to keep warming under 2°C.
Well into 2023, Elsevier R&D was still openly promoting that it acts in service of most Fortune 500 oil and gas companies, with resources and tools to scale up operations, respond to new opportunities, and increase exploration successes. While Geofacets has been described as having been "sunsetted," its use is still being promoted for entities engaged in fossil fuel expansion. As an OSDU Forum member, Elsevier also provides geophysical information on the Amazon OSDU platform—where data is provided to oil majors that have business plans antithetical to net zero pathways, warming targets, and a global, science-based, and just transition.
RELX exhibitions provide valuable resources for coal company customers and partners that are still expanding development of unburnable coal, refusing to decarbonize, and severely misaligned with the Paris Agreement.
Financial support for political leaders in the United States, some of whom act to block effective climate action and deny climate change. Said one past recipient: "There isn't any real science to say we are altering the climate path of the earth."