Big Oil makes a killing
Big Oil makes a killing
Exxon, Shell, and Chevron just announced record-breaking quarterly profits while the rest of us pay for more and deadlier climate disasters.
Scorching heat waves are spanning the globe, the Rio Grande is running dry, and record rains have devastated the St. Louis area and left at least two people dead.
Meanwhile, the corporations that knowingly caused and continue to fuel the climate crisis just announced some of their highest quarterly profits of all time. While working families struggled with record prices at the pump, Shell posted an $11.5 billion profit, Chevron $11.6 billion, and ExxonMobil surpassed them all with a mind-boggling $17.9 billion. Each of these profits smashed all-time company records and were made in just the last three months.
And what will these corporations do with all this cash? Not make real investments in renewable energy or reimburse communities for the climate damages they’re causing. Instead, they’re mostly using them to enrich shareholders and executives through stock buybacks.
By comparison, Exxon’s $17.9 billion in profits for just three months in 2022 are more than all the low-carbon investments the company has pledged to make through 2027, combined.
For these companies, cooking the Earth is good for business.
After all, the global addiction to fossil fuels is what makes their profits possible, and it’s why they have fought to maintain the status quo for years. Congress may finally be taking long overdue action to begin addressing the climate crisis, but that delay has come at a steep price.
Since an internal 1979 Exxon study confirmed the link between fossil fuels and climate change, the U.S. has sustained 332 weather and climate disasters where overall damages reached or exceeded $1 billion — totaling more than $2 trillion in total costs. In 2022 alone, the U.S. has already experienced 9 climate disasters with losses exceeding $1 billion each.
It’s outrageous that Big Oil makes billions while the rest of us pay the price.
One step that Congress could take to address this injustice would be to pass the Big Oil Windfall Profits Tax Act sponsored by Representative Ro Khanna and Senator Sheldon Whitehouse.
But as heatwaves, wildfires, floods, and other climate disasters drive up costs for local governments across the country, the polluters that caused the problem should also be held accountable to pay their fair share.
In Ohio alone, one recent study found that climate change could cost local governments nearly $6 billion a year by 2050. As the authors of that report outlined, cash-strapped municipalities really have only three options for covering these costs: raising taxes, hoping for state or federal relief, or, as the Ohio Environmental Council and Power a Clean Future Ohio wrote, local governments could “ensure that the corporate actors most responsible for causing and exacerbating climate change should be responsible for their fair share of the financial costs of adaptation and resilience.”
In other words, make Big Oil pay.