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 products still inform the fossil fuel industry's development of new resources, avoiding its UNGP human rights obligations.
Elsevier publications—some with authors and editors who are employees of Exxon, Chevron, and other oil majors misaligned with a safe future—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. With research institutions and policy makers compromised by Elsevier's fossil fuel industry customers, these businesses are funding extensive research to suit their business aims while blocking climate policy that would restrict it. Papers across Elsevier's portfolio cite the need to meet global demand for oil and gas, not critical climate goals. Additionally, Elsevier still publishes 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 to scale up operations, respond to new opportunities, and increase exploration successes. Into 2024, Elsevier was listed as an OSDU Forum member, providing 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 companies that are still expanding development of unburnable coal, refusing to decarbonize, and severely misaligned with the Paris Agreement.
RELX's PAC provides 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."