The last Labour Prime Minister, Gordon Brown, has called on the world’s most prosperous oil states to pay a 3% tax on their export earnings to help poorer nations combat climate change.
In 2022, a 3% tax was, he said, equivalent to $25 billion (£20.4 billion).
He proposed this “climate solidarity pact” to avoid a potential stalemate at the COP28 summit in Dubai, United Arab Emirates (UAE), this November.
He said that countries such as Saudi Arabia, the UAE and Norway have benefited from a “lottery-style bonanza” due to the soaring price of oil. And that the high cost of oil and gas has been the main factor in potentially pushing millions worldwide into extreme poverty.
It would be naive to expect a Labour politician to care about the interests of native Britons. However, it’s telling that he has also ignored everyone in the UK trying hard to cope with excessive energy costs.
His only concern here is people living in the global south.
And yet again, the climate change agenda is being used as a pretext for compensation/reparations to Third World countries.
While we’d shed no tears if the likes of UAE and Saudi Arabia lost some of their inflated oil profits, there’s no suggestion here that any of the billions mentioned would help people struggling to make ends meet.
We wonder, too, whether this is a Trojan Horse for something far more substantial further down the line. After all, the UK is a producer of oil and gas. How long before we are asked to pay up?
And will this more limited “climate solidarity pact” lead to more calls over time for Western countries to put themselves into greater and greater debt to pay compensation/reparations for claimed global injustices?
If such a policy is implemented, it could have the unintended consequence of causing a surge in oil prices. This is because oil-producing states, which would shoulder the burden of a 3% loss in revenue, may offset this loss by increasing the cost of oil to consumers. As a result, consumers may pay more for oil, which could increase the cost of goods and services across multiple industries that rely on oil.
Time will tell.
