Chevron CEO Pay Jumped to $26.5 Million During Hottest Year on Record

The chief executive of the U.S. oil giant Chevron saw his pay jump by more than 12% in 2023 as continued emissions from fossil fuel corporations helped push global temperatures to record heights.

Citing a new securities filing, Reutersreported Wednesday that Chevron CEO Mike Wirth received $26.5 million in total compensation last year. Chevron, the second-largest oil company in the U.S. by revenue, reported $21.3 billion in profits in 2023—a haul it used to lavish shareholders with buybacks and dividends.

News of Wirth's 2023 compensation came a day after the European Union's Copernicus Climate Change Service (C3S) announced that last month was the hottest March on record globally. The organization said March marked "the 10th month in a row that is the warmest on record for the respective month of the year."

Samantha Burgess, deputy director of C3S, said in a statement that "March 2024 continues the sequence of climate records toppling for both air temperature and ocean surface temperatures."

"Stopping further warming requires rapid reductions in greenhouse gas emissions," Burgess stressed.

But oil giants like Chevron, the primary drivers of the global climate emergency, have been rolling back their already tepid climate commitments and buying up rival oil producers—a signal that the industry is bent on continuing to drill as much as possible despite increasingly dire warnings from scientists.

A Carbon Majors report released earlier this week found that Chevron is one of just 57 oil, gas, coal, and cement producers responsible for 80% of global CO2 emissions from those industries.

A separate analysis published last month by Global Witness estimated that the emissions of Chevron, Shell, TotalEnergies, ExxonMobil, and BP could cause 11.5 million additional premature deaths around the world before the end of the century.

"In the past few months, ExxonMobil and Chevron have invested more than $100 billion into new oil and gas reserves," the human rights group noted. "BP and Shell weakened their climate pledges. And TotalEnergies plans to ramp up production in the next few years."

"Fossil fuel companies' systematic spreading of climate change denial, combined with lobbying, has slowed the transformation towards an energy system built on renewables," Global Witness added. "And yet, the supermajors are asking us to trust them, to allow them to be the ultimate arbiter, despite the massive profits they're making."