A small tax on just seven of the world’s biggest oil and gas companies could grow the UN Fund for Responding to Loss and Damage by more than 2000% and help address the costs of extreme weather events, according to new analysis published today by Greenpeace International and Stamp Out Poverty. The organisations are calling for a long term global tax on fossil fuel extraction, with year-on-year increases, combined with taxes on excess profits and other levies.
A ‘Climate Damages Tax’ would put a cost on every tonne of carbon emitted by the coal, oil and gas extracted – starting at $5 per tonne and rising each year thereafter. If it was imposed on ExxonMobil, Shell, Chevron, TotalEnergies, BP, Equinor and ENI it could raise $15 billion in the first year alone to help the world’s most climate-vulnerable countries pay for the escalating cost of damage caused by climate change. Currently, just $702 million has been pledged to the loss and damage fund, while the combined profits of those fossil fuel companies exceeds $148 billion.
Greenpeace activists display a billboard during a protest outside Shell headquarters on July 27, 2023 in London. (Photo: Handout/Chris J. Ratcliffe for Greenpeace via Getty Images)
Earlier this month, Barbados Prime Minister Mia Mottley, French President Emmanuel Macron and Kenyan President William Ruto stated their support for a Climate Damages Tax.
The briefing also highlights the financial costs of some of this year’s worst weather events that have been attributed to climate change, totalling over $64bn. These include Hurricane Beryl, Hurricane Helene, the heatwave in India in May, Typhoon Carina/Gaemi, the floods in Brazil in May, and the floods in Kenya and Tanzania in April. The costs of damage from the disasters surveyed range from US$2.9bn (Typhoon Carina) to US$ 25bn (heatwaves in India), and present just a fraction of the total cost of loss and damage globally over the last year.
A Climate Damages Tax imposed only on wealthy OECD countries could play an essential role in helping the poorest and most vulnerable to rebuild after climate-related disasters. Increasing annually by US$5 per tonne of CO2-equivalent based on the volumes of oil and gas extracted, the tax could raise an estimated US$900 billion by 2030 to support governments and communities around the world as they face growing climate impacts.
“While oil and gas giants keep raking in grotesque levels of profit from exploiting resources, the damages resulting from the industry’s operations are disproportionately borne by people who did not cause the crisis,” said David Hillman, Director of Stamp Out Poverty. “A climate damages tax – along with other levies on fossil fuels and high-emitting sectors – will make polluters pay for the cost of climate impacts, as well as supporting workers and affected communities in the transition to clean energy, jobs, and transport.”
“Who should pay? This is fundamentally an issue of climate justice and it is time to shift the financial burden for the climate crisis from its victims to the polluters behind it,” said Abdoulaye Diallo, Co-Head of Greenpeace International’s Stop Drilling Start Paying campaign. “Our analysis lays bare the scale of the challenge posed by climate loss and damage and the urgent need for innovative solutions to raise the funds to meet it. We reject Big Oil’s assault on people and democracy and call on governments worldwide to adopt the Climate Damages Tax and other mechanisms to extract revenue from the oil and gas industry.”
The Loss and Damage Fund was announced at COP27 in Egypt to help developing countries pay for impacts of natural disasters caused by climate change. Recently renamed the Fund for Responding to Loss and Damage (FRLD), it currently has US$702 million in pledged funds. According to Greenpeace International and Stamp Out Poverty’s calculations, a Climate Damages Tax levied on seven major international oil and gas companies would add in the first year alone US$15.02 billion, corresponding to over 21 times what is currently pledged to the fund.
Experienced climbers scale a rock face near the historic Dumbarton castle in Glasgow, releasing a banner that reads “Climate on a Cliff Edge.” One activist, dressed as a globe, symbolically looms near the edge, while another plays the bagpipes on the shores below. | Photo courtesy of Extinction Rebellion and Mark Richards
Firefighters in a boat make their way past a car submerged by the floods in Rust im Tullnerfeld, Austria, on September 16, 2024. (Photo: Helmut Fohringer/APA/AFP via Getty Images)
“We are deeply worried such events will get worse until oil and gas giants like Shell, Total, Equinor, Exxon, OMV, and ENI are forced to stop drilling for fossil fuels driving climate change,” said one campaigner.
The international climate group Greenpeace on Friday called on European leaders to “reciprocate” the courage shown by first responders in several countries over the weekend by forcing fossil fuel giants to pay for climate damages.
Calling out leaders including Polish Prime Minister Donald Tusk, Czech Prime Minister Petr Fiala, and Romania Prime Minister Marcel Ciolacu, Greenpeace campaigner Ian Duff said Central and Eastern European countries should end their “support for fossil fuels and [make] climate polluters pay for this disaster,” as emergency workers rescued people from catastrophic flooding.
The death toll on Monday rose to at least 16, with many more people missing and hundreds of thousands of people displaced in countries including Austria, the Czech Republic, Hungary, Romania, and Slovakia after the low-pressure system Storm Boris dumped torrential rains on the region for days starting late last week.
Two men, aged 70 and 80, drowned in their homes in northeastern Lower Austria after being trapped by rising floodwater, and confirmed deaths in Poland rose to six.
About 70% of Litovel, about 140 miles east of the Czech capital of Prague, was underwater Monday, while a power plant servicing the country’s third-largest city was forced to shut down and leave residents without heat and hot water.
“Greenpeace is horrified by damages brought by floods across Central and Eastern Europe, claiming lives, leaving homes without power and farmers with ruined fields, after being already ravaged by drought,” said Duff, head of Greenpeace’s Stop Drilling Start Paying campaign. “We are deeply worried such events will get worse until oil and gas giants like Shell, Total, Equinor, Exxon, OMV, and ENI are forced to stop drilling for fossil fuels driving climate change.”
In the U.S., the notion of big polluters being required to pay for damages caused by the climate crisis has recently gained traction, with lawmakers introducing a bill in Congress last week.
In Europe, a “polluter pays” principle is followed for many kinds of pollution, but advocates have called for it to be applied to planet-heating greenhouse gas emissions.
The flooding in Europe comes, as London-based meteorologist Scott Duncan explained on the social media platform X, after “an exceptional summer for the Mediterranean Sea,” with heat records broken—just as scientists have warned this year that record heat in the North Atlantic and other oceans around the globe would mean “a busy hurricane season.”
“Warmer sea surface temperatures allow more moisture to evaporate, like fuel for a storm. The warmer the water, the greater the evaporation,” said Duncan.
Liz Stephens, science lead for the Red Cross Red Crescent Climate Center, noted that in Central and Eastern Europe, “climate change is known to be playing a role in increasing the risk of flooding,” with the World Weather Attribution saying in 2021 that disastrous flooding that hit Germany and Belgium was tied to “a rapidly warming climate.”
Reports by the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC), Stephens added, “have indicated that we have already observed an upward trend in heavy rainfall, surface water, and river flooding, and climate models show high confidence of further increases into the future.”
“The flooding looks set to be the worst in the region since 2002,” she said. “Lessons will have been learned from previous big European floods, but forecasts for some locations are for flooding of unprecedented magnitude, and history tells us that people are often surprised by the seemingly unimaginable consequences of such events.”
Journalist and climate advocate George Monbiot pointed out on Al Jazeera that storms previously described as “once-in-1,000-year occurrences [are] happening several times now in the past decade. We’re seeing a massive acceleration and intensification of extreme weather events, and unfortunately this is exactly what climate scientists were predicting.”
.@GeorgeMonbiot: "I've seen what were described as once in a 1,000 year occurrences happening several times now in the past decade. We're seeing a massive acceleration and intensification of extreme weather events" pic.twitter.com/wzgntdDpbq
Climate action group Friends of the Earthechoed Greenpeace’s demand to “leave fossil fuels in the ground and instead invest in a green future,” and Duff emphasized that communities across Central and Eastern Europe are far from the only ones “reeling from deadly floods and torrential rains,” with Typhoon Yagi causing flooding and landslides that killed at least 250 people in Southeast Asia in recent days and heavy rains across West and Central Africa leading to floods that killed more than 1,000 people.
“The fossil fuel industry,” said Duff, “is worsening weather extremes everywhere.”
A new report shows oil majors fall short of meeting Paris Agreement targets while fueling global military conflicts.
Oil majors are not on track to hit Paris Agreement climate targets that limit global temperature rise to 1.5°C, a new report reveals.
Eight fossil fuel giants – Chevron, ExxonMobil, Shell, TotalEnergies, BP, Eni, Equinor, and ConocoPhillips – are on course to use 30 percent of the world’s remaining carbon budget for that 1.5°C goal, according to the Big Oil Reality Check report by nonprofit Oil Change International (OCI).
Combined, the oil and gas companies’ extraction plans are consistent with a temperature rise of over 2.4°C, the report found.That level of warming, according to the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change, will reduce food security, risk irreversible loss of ecosystems, and increase heat waves, rainfall, and extreme weather events.
“We analyzed the climate promises and plans of the largest eight international oil and gas companies that are owned in North America and Europe. What would it take for an oil and gas producer to align their production with limiting warming to 1.5?” David Tong, global industry campaign manager at OCI and co-author of the report, told DeSmog.
“If an oil and gas company were serious about transitioning its business model, the first step would be ending all new production and then setting a Paris-aligned phaseout plan,” he added.
‘No New Fossil’ Standard
A recent paper by academics at University College London and the International Institute for Sustainable Development, published in Science in May, calls for stopping fossil fuel expansion and building a “No New Fossil” global norm. According to the authors, this would make it “easier to phase down fossil fuels” and achieve the Paris Agreement climate goals.
No new fossil fuel projects would be needed in a 1.5°C world, they wrote, because the “existing fossil fuel capital stock” is sufficient to meet energy demand. The authors also note that preventing new fossil fuel projects is, in general, more feasible than closing existing projects from an economic, political, and legal viewpoint.
In the face of continuing global pressure to stop fossil fuel expansion, Chevron, ConocoPhillips, Equinor, Eni, ExxonMobil, and TotalEnergies have goals to increase oil and gas production within the next three years or beyond, the OCI report finds. While Shell does not quantify a target, the company plans to keep oil production steady while growing gas production in the near future, OCI said.
#BigOil has, in recent years, made splashy climate pledges to cut their greenhouse gas emissions & take on the climate crisis, but those plans don't stand up to scrutiny.
— Center for International Environmental Law (@ciel_tweets) May 27, 2024
“None of those companies came anywhere close to alignment [with climate goals],” said Tong. “Six of the eight companies we analyzed have explicit plans to increase their oil and gas production in this critical decade when we need to be cutting our reliance on fossil fuels, cutting oil, gas, and oil production.”
Plateauing oil and expanding gas production, like some of these companies plan to do, is “grossly insufficient” compared with the action that’s needed, Tong added. Even commitments to make businesses more efficient aren’t going to cut it alone, he said.
“It’s like a cigarette company claiming that it will solve lung cancer by producing cigarettes more efficiently,” he noted. “That’s not just not a credible claim. It’s a promise to become a more efficient climate breaker.”
Big Oil and War
According to the OCI report, all the oil majors fail to meet basic criteria for just transition plans for workers and communities where they operate.
“A number of these companies also face significant ongoing, unresolved allegations of human rights … and Indigenous people’s rights violations,” Tong told me.
A March 2024 investigation, commissioned by OCI and conducted by DataDesk, revealed that ExxonMobil, Chevron, TotalEnergies, BP, Shell, and Eni are “complicit in facilitating the supply of crude oil to Israel.” These findings are particularly noteworthy in the context of “Israel’s mounting evidence of war crimes” against Palestinians in Gaza, the OCI states in its new report.
Diesel and gasoline for tanks and other military vehicles are supplied by Israel’s refineries, which rely on regular imports of crude oil by these companies and, since October 2023, supplies mainly from Azerbaijan, Kazakhstan/Russia, Gabon, and Brazil, the research has found.
The fossil fuel industry is “fueling war and military conflicts” in many regions of the world, said Svitlana Romanko, a prominent Ukrainian activist and founder and director of Razom We Stand, a Ukrainian organization campaigning to ban all imports of fossil fuels from Russia.
According to Romanko, the OCI Big Oil Reality Check report “reinforces the importance of moving away from fossil fuels and investing into distributed renewable energy.”
A new analysis by a group of climate experts estimates that the first two years of Russia’s war on Ukraine resulted in greenhouse gas emissions equivalent to around 175 million tonnes of carbon dioxide. The estimated global cost of this warming in extreme weather impacts: $32 billion.
After Russia launched its full-scale invasion of Ukraine in February 2022, Russia earned over 681 billion euros in revenue from fossil fuel exports. European Union countries purchased fossil fuels from Russia for more than 195 billion euros.
Big Oil, as well as Russia, is profiting from the war, Romanko said. After the invasion, BP, Chevron, Equinor, ExxonMobil, Shell, and TotalEnergies raked in $219 billion, more than double their profits compared to the previous year.
“Most [governments] subsidize fossil fuels, and these subsidies are accounting for trillions of U.S. dollars annually,” Romanko said. “This is a big part of fossil fuel profits, and the more fossil fuels are subsidized, [the] less investments are made available for renewable energies.”
She pointed out that the partnership between TotalEnergies and Russia’s largest private gas producer, Novatek, was also “instrumental” in helping Russia get access to technologies and engineering services to launch Novatek’s Yamal LNG and Arctic LNG 2 projects.
Romanko notes that fossil fuel infrastructure can also constitute a liability for military attacks and quickly become a target.
“Centralized infrastructure endangers energy supply and overall safety of the supply,” she said. In Ukraine, a massive effort to install solar power plants in schools and hospitals helped decentralize this key resource, Romanko explained. “Decentralized energy supply is essential to building true energy independence,” she added. “And this is the future.”
Pressure for Accountability
Some of the eight oil majors in OCI’s report have faced more international and national scrutiny than others. Such pressure can facilitate accountability, but that’s less likely when the fossil fuel company is closely intertwined with the institutional, political, and economic life of its country.
“We need to look at what has succeeded in putting so much pressure on companies like Shell and BP,” OCI’s Tong said.
One factor: when communities in a company’s home country work closely in partnership with communities in fossil fuel-producing countries. Tong said that positive results also happen when campaigners use a range of strategies to expose producers, from nonviolent direct action to op-eds, research, and court action.
“This is particularly challenging with Eni, TotalEnergies, and Equinor in different ways because of the close interactions that each of the companies have with their home states,” he added.
Public, political, and legal pressure for accountability must also be coupled with industry regulation, according to Tong.
“We concluded that there is no evidence that the oil and gas sector will voluntarily transition to renewable energy, or voluntarily act to align their production with what’s needed for the Paris Agreement,” Tong said. Instead, governments must no longer license new production sites.
The strong right-wing result in the latest EU Parliament elections could also affect Big Oil’s energy transition.
“The more the links between the state and big polluters are overt, the more people get out in the streets and protest,” Tong said.
What is safe to say is that Big Oil’s business as usual will increase climate change effects.
“Floods, hurricanes, extreme weather events, and the millions of human lives affected and lost – this damage to nature, to human lives and to life on earth will only mount,” Romanko said. “What will be lost in a few more years will also mount if fossil fuel companies are allowed to continue with business as usual.”
An ExxonMobil oil refinery is pictured in Baton Rouge, Louisiana. (Photo: Barry Lewis/InPictures via Getty Images)
“We cannot trust fossil fuel corporations to do anything but line the pockets of their CEOs and investors at the cost of our climate and communities,” one campaigner said.
The eight largest U.S. and Europe-based oil and gas producing companies are failing to align their plans with the Paris agreement goal of limiting global heating to 1.5°C above preindustrial levels and avoiding ever more catastrophic climate impacts.
Oil Change International’s Big Oil Reality Check report, released Tuesday, concludes that the plans of BP, Chevron, ConocoPhillips, Eni, Equinor, ExxonMobil, Shell, and TotalEnergies would actually put the world on track for more than 2.4°C of warming and burn through nearly one-third of the global carbon budget for hitting the 1.5°C target.
“It’s clearer than ever that oil and gas companies—the climate arsonists fueling climate chaos—cannot be trusted to put out the fire,” David Tong, report author and global industry campaign manager at Oil Change International, said in a statement. “There is no evidence that big oil and gas companies are acting seriously to be part of the energy transition.”
“The Big Oil Reality Check report reveals that oil and gas corporations are more interested in looking like they are acting on climate change than actually acting on climate change.”
For its fourth annual Big Oil Reality Check, Oil Change International judged the oil companies’ climate plans and pledges against a set of minimum standards for alignment with the Paris agreement. The standards were divided into three main categories: ambition, integrity, and people-centered transitions.
Under ambition, the companies were assessed on whether they had plans to stop oil and gas exploration, stop approving new extraction projects, decrease production every year through 2030, and stop extraction on a certain date while outlining a long-term plan to end production.
Under integrity, the companies were assessed on whether their emissions-reduction plans included their entire supply chain, whether they relied on carbon capture or offsets, whether their methane-reduction plans were really in line with climate goals, and whether they lobbied or advertised against climate action.
For people-centered transitions, they were assessed on whether they had just transition plans for employees and members of frontline communities and whether they respected human rights overall and the rights of Indigenous peoples, including to free, prior, or informed consent to any fossil fuel activities.
The companies were then rated from “fully aligned” to “grossly insufficient” for how well their plans complied with the Paris goals within the assessment’s framework, but all eight companies scored “insufficient” or “grossly insufficient” for a majority of the criteria.
Only one company—Eni—scored above “insufficient” in any category, earning a ranking of “partially aligned” for having greenhouse gas-reduction plans that included its supply chains. The three U.S.-based companies—Chevron, ConocoPhillips, and ExxonMobil—scored “grossly insufficient” for all 10 criteria.
Big Oil & Gas companies spend a lot of time and effort on public relations. We're here with a dose of reality.
— Oil Change International (@PriceofOil) May 21, 2024
“American fossil fuel corporations are the worst of the worst,” Oil Change International’s U.S. program manager Allie Rosenbluth said. “Chevron, ExxonMobil, and ConocoPhillips perpetuate harm in frontline communities not only across the U.S. but worldwide.”
Oil Change found that six out of the eight companies have official plans to increase oil and gas production. The only two that did not were BP and Shell; however, these companies employ a misleading strategy. They compensate for new oil and gas projects by selling off polluting assets. While the emissions from the sold operations no longer count toward company emissions, they still count toward the planet’s total. This practice is out of line with the GHG Protocol on corporate emissions accounting and may violate the United Nations Guiding Principles on Business and Human Rights.
Four of the companies assessed in the report—BP, Shell, Exxon, and Chevron—were also the subject of a recent U.S. House investigation and Senate hearing detailing how the fossil fuel industry playbook has shifted from outright denial of climate science to greenwashing its activities by presenting itself as part of the solution to the climate crisis while its day-to-day operations continue to raise global temperatures.
“The efforts of climate and social movements have forced oil and gas companies to acknowledge that fossil fuels are dirty and dangerous, leading to a variety of climate pledges and ‘plans,'” said Oil Change campaigner Myriam Douo. “The Big Oil Reality Check report reveals that oil and gas corporations are more interested in looking like they are acting on climate change than actually acting on climate change.”
“They spend billions on smoke and mirrors to try to fool us into believing they have solutions for a livable planet when, in reality, they are perpetuating harm to the climate and local communities while trying to suck every last ounce of profit out of their dirty fossil fuel business,” Douo concluded.
All told, Rystand energy data suggests that the combined production of the eight companies will be 17% by 2030 than they were last year.
“Such an increase in production on a global scale would put the world on a path towards global heating well beyond 2°C, locking in destruction of vulnerable communities and ecosystems,” the report authors wrote.
The report finds that all of the companies intend to rely on unproven carbon capture technology or offsets schemes to meet their claimed emission-reduction goals and have continued to spend money on lobbying against climate action and greenwashing their own activities since the agreement in Paris.
Further, no company has plans consistent with ensuring a just transition or protecting human rights. In one recent and urgent example, ExxonMobil, Chevron, TotalEnergies, BP, Shell, and Eni all continue to provide Israel with crude oil despite “the Israeli military’s ongoing assault on Palestinian civilians, ecosystems, and infrastructure in Gaza and mounting evidence of war crimes,” a March Oil Change investigation found.
The report comes nearly half a year after world leaders agreed to contribute to “transitioning away from fossil fuels” at the COP28 U.N. climate change conference in Dubai. In light of its conclusions, Oil Change called on governments to take action to further a just transition:
Stop permitting or approving new fossil fuel projects or infrastructure;
Set a Paris-aligned date for phasing out fossil fuel production;
End subsidies and financing for fossil fuels and false solutions like carbon capture;
Use tax policy to incentivize against investing in fossil fuels;
Craft a just transition, including by making polluters pay for cleanup and reparations; and
Passing laws to protect human rights and Indigenous rights and giving communities a legal mechanism to seek redress from corporate polluters.
Oil Change also argued that governments in the Global North should hold companies headquartered within their borders accountable for harm abroad and put money into funds to enable the Global South to transition to renewable energy, adapt to climate change, and pay for inevitable loss and damage.
“This year’s Big Oil Reality Check makes it clearer than ever—we cannot trust fossil fuel corporations to do anything but line the pockets of their CEOs and investors at the cost of our climate and communities,” Rosenbluth said. “People around the world are rising up to end the era of fossil fuels and build a just energy system that puts climate and communities first.”
Greenpeace climate justice activists approaching Shell platform en route to major oilfield (Photo: Chris J Ratcliffe / Greenpeace)
“It has become clear: Eni is trying to silence anyone who dares to speak up and denounce the company’s contribution to the fueling of the climate crisis,” says Chiara Campione of Greenpeace Italy.
Greenpeace Italy revealed Wednesday that the Italian multinational energy company Eni is threatening a libel suit against it over reports the organization published about oil and gas companies.
Greenpeace said the potential lawsuit is related to a report on temperature-related premature deaths that may be caused by emissions from oil and gas companies like Eni and a report on the concept of “climate homicide.”
“We face yet another act of intimidation by Eni; it seems that threatening defamation lawsuits is the new sport which the company has decided to pursue most enthusiastically. But we won’t be silenced,” said Chiara Campione of Greenpeace Italy. “This new potential defamation lawsuit follows a similar case initiated by Eni against Greenpeace Italia only a few months ago.”
OOOPS ENI DID IT AGAIN! It seems that threatening defamation lawsuits is the new sport which the company has decided to pursue most enthusiastically. https://t.co/zZjhRdCa0f
Eni was given an opportunity to respond to the findings of the Greenpeace reports, but the group said Eni offered “no substantive rebuttal” and threatened legal action. The organization claimed other oil and gas companies mentioned in these reports have not threatened legal action.
Greenpeace Italy and the climate advocacy group ReCommon are currently suing Eni over its alleged contributions to the climate crisis. The first hearing for that case occurred last month.
“It has become clear: Eni is trying to silence anyone who dares to speak up and denounce the company’s contribution to the fueling of the climate crisis,” Campione said.
The multinational oil giant Shell sued Greenpeace in November for alleged damages related to Greenpeace activists boarding one of the company’s oil platforms. Shell is trying to get as much as $8.6 million in damages, which Greenpeace says would greatly threaten its ability to campaign.
The French multinational oil and gas company TotalEnergies is also suing Greenpeace France over a report that claimed it underestimated its 2019 greenhouse gas emissions.
Greenpeace said Wednesday that these companies are trying to “stop Greenpeace and other organizations from denouncing the damage the fossil fuel industry is causing to people and the planet.”
