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The Worst Companies for the Environment in 2026 (Scored)
Ask most companies how they treat the planet and you will get a glossy answer. Net-zero pledges, biodiversity commitments, science-based targets stretching out to 2050. The marketing rarely matches the record.
Our Planet-Friendly Business value is built to ignore the marketing. It scores companies from -100 to +100 on what they actually do to the environment, drawn from regulatory enforcement actions, audited emissions data and investigative reporting. Self-declared sustainability claims carry no weight unless an independent source confirms them.
This article lists the companies sitting at the bottom of that scale in 2026. The pattern is not subtle. Oil majors, coal producers and diversified miners dominate the floor.
How the scoring works
The Planet-Friendly Business value asks a single question: does this company's operating footprint leave the natural world better or worse off?
To answer it, we weight evidence by reliability. Environmental enforcement actions from regulators rank highest, because they represent findings of fact, not opinion. Audited emissions disclosures and pollution-release inventories come next. Investigative journalism and documented NGO field reports fill in conduct that regulators have not yet acted on.
A company that markets itself as a climate leader while expanding fossil extraction does not get credit for the marketing. It gets scored on the extraction. That is why the scores below diverge so sharply from the sustainability reports these same companies publish.
A score of -80 is not a rounding error. It reflects a sustained, documented record of environmental harm that the company's own disclosures do not offset.
The worst companies for the environment in 2026
The table ranks the lowest scorers on Planet-Friendly Business. Five large-cap operators share a -80 floor. One company sits even lower on the related climate dimension.
| Company | Sector | Planet-Friendly Business |
|---|---|---|
| Berkshire Hathaway | Conglomerate (climate dimension) | -90 |
| ExxonMobil | Integrated oil and gas | -80 |
| Chevron | Integrated oil and gas | -80 |
| Rio Tinto | Diversified mining | -80 |
| Alliance Resource Partners | Coal | -80 |
| PBF Energy | Petroleum refining | -80 |
The companies clustered at -80 are not outliers within their industries. They are representative of them. When the worst scorers all come from the same three sectors, the sector itself is the story.
Oil majors anchor the bottom
ExxonMobil and Chevron both score -80. These are the two largest investor-owned oil companies in the United States, and the score reflects the full lifecycle of their business: extraction, refining and the combustion of the products they sell.
Their environmental footprint is not a side effect of the business. It is the business. Continued exploration spending, expansion of production capacity and a long enforcement history all weigh on the score. The US EPA, for example, documents Clean Air Act allegations and pollution controls covering eight ExxonMobil facilities and a national Chevron refinery settlement. The net-zero language in their annual reports does not move it, because the operating data does not support the language.
We have written separately on how the majors stack up against each other in our comparison of Shell, BP and ExxonMobil on climate action. The headline finding holds here: the gap between stated ambition and measured behaviour is widest at exactly the companies that talk about it most.
PBF Energy, also at -80, sits one step down the value chain. As a pure-play refiner it carries the concentrated local pollution burden of turning crude into fuel, with the regulatory record on air emissions to match.
Coal and mining fill the rest of the floor
Alliance Resource Partners is a coal producer, and coal is the most carbon-intensive fossil fuel by unit of energy. A -80 score follows almost mechanically from a business model whose core product is burned for power. There is no plausible version of coal extraction that scores well on a planet-friendly measure, and the data does not pretend otherwise.
Rio Tinto, at the same -80, represents the diversified mining sector. Large-scale mining combines heavy land disruption, water contamination risk, tailings-dam exposure and substantial process emissions. Rio Tinto's environmental record, including documented incidents that drew international attention, places it firmly among the worst scorers.
We examine the sector in more depth in our analysis of mining companies and their environmental scores, where the structural difficulty of extracting metals at scale without environmental damage is laid out across the industry.
Why one conglomerate scores worse than the oil majors
The single lowest large-cap score belongs not to an oil company but to a holding company. Berkshire Hathaway scores -90 on climate, worse than any of the dedicated fossil operators above.
The reason is consolidation. Berkshire owns utilities and railroads with heavy fossil exposure, holds large equity stakes in oil majors, and aggregates the climate footprint of a sprawling portfolio under one ticker. An investor who holds Berkshire as a "safe" blue-chip is holding concentrated fossil exposure without the label. The score makes that visible.
This is the value of look-through scoring. A name that carries no environmental connotation can still sit at the very bottom of the table once its underlying businesses are measured rather than assumed.
What this means for investors
The companies above are not fringe holdings. They appear in the largest index funds, the most widely held pension allocations and a great many portfolios marketed as responsible. Most investors own at least one of them without knowing the score.
The broader pattern is worse than these six names suggest. We found that 91 percent of companies fail our climate criteria to some degree, which means the bottom of the table is crowded and the genuinely planet-friendly cohort is small. A diversified portfolio assembled without environmental screening will almost certainly contain heavy exposure to the worst scorers.
The point of scoring on enforcement and emissions, rather than on disclosure quality, is to remove the company's own narrative from the equation. A polished sustainability report can lift a marketing score. It cannot lift this one.
See where your own holdings sit
You do not have to take the table at face value. Every score links to the underlying evidence, and you can check any company yourself.
Use company search to inspect a company's Planet-Friendly Business score and the enforcement and emissions record behind it. Every score page links directly to the original evidence.
The marketing will keep improving. The scores are built so they do not have to.