Committing countries or companies to climate pledges doesn’t guarantee that those pledges will be honored. After all, the planet is getting a great deal hotter every year, with the record-breaking temperature in India in May just the latest example. If companies and countries were fully honoring their commitments, it’s highly likely that the rate of global warming would be slowing. And one reason why companies and countries are not honoring their pledges is a simple lack of transparency.
This is where technology comes in. We now have at our disposal tools that allow us to see, with pinpoint precision and in close to real-time, exactly what is going on with regard to the climate and where. We can see, for instance, that the average difference between what the 42 biggest oil and gas producers say they emit, and what they actually emit, is vast.
