UK carbon tax proposals shaped by BP and Shell, private email shows

Fossil fuel giants BP and Shell have ample opportunity to personally influence proposals to tax oil and gas companies that would later receive government support, new documents show.

Internal BP emails show British executives were convinced they could set up the company through a controversial oil industry group. [the] Inside thoughts on the 2018 Carbon Tax Report prepared by right-wing think tank Policy Exchange.

The emails were among hundreds of documents released by a powerful committee of U.S. politicians last week as part of a three-year investigation into how the oil industry worked to undermine efforts to combat climate change.

Policy Exchange has been credited by Chancellor Rishi Sunak for helping draft legislation to crack down on climate protests, and has previously received funding from oil and gas giant ExxonMobil. .

The think tank commissioned the Climate Leadership Council (CLC), a controversial US non-profit whose founding members include multinationals such as BP, Shell, TotalEnergies, automakers Ford, General Motors and Unilever, to produce a report on carbon pricing. I received a request. Microsoft.

The think tank's recommendations largely mirrored the CLC's proposal to raise the controversial carbon emissions tax, which has been criticized as a policy favored by the fossil fuel industry. The report also proposed phasing out a number of environmental regulations in the UK to reduce the burden on businesses.

The UK has been the first to tax carbon emissions since 2005 under the European Union's emissions trading scheme.

The plan works by setting a maximum overall cap on the carbon emissions the energy and manufacturing industries can emit. Polluters are only allowed to emit a set quota of carbon. If you exceed the allowance, you may be subject to a fine. To avoid being fined, a company can buy additional allocations from other companies that have excess allocations because they emit less than their quota.

Each year, the EU reduces its overall emissions cap, which means the price of emissions permits, also known as carbon prices, rises, which the EU says acts as an incentive to reduce emissions.

But the policy is popular among oil and gas companies, according to Bill McGuire, emeritus professor of geophysics and climate risk at UCL.

Paying a carbon tax is preferable to stopping all exploration, keeping fossil fuels in the ground, and changing business models to accommodate the needed renewable energy, and they have clearly concluded that this is easy to do given the huge profits. Reached. Handle, he said.

After the UK left the EU in 2016, the UK government began devising its own alternative trading emissions plan, which the Policy Exchange report sought to influence.

The report was cited in the government's policy paper on the new long-term emissions trading scheme last December, which justifies the argument that carbon pricing is an effective, market-based way to enable companies to make economically rational decarbonization investment decisions. It was used to.

Policy Exchange acknowledged at the time that the report received financial support from CLC, which it claimed was a strategic partner. But the think tank said it did not intend to represent the views of the council or its founding members on UK or EU issues.

According to internal BP emails, bosses at the British oil company were initially surprised that the CLC had commissioned the report and sought a meeting with the council's founders.

According to the email, given the company's unique position and timing in the UK, the meeting allowed BP to raise a range of potential policy, political and commercial concerns related to the content of the report.

After the meeting, BP's then head of group policy, Paul Jefferiss, assured Andrew Mennear, BP's director of UK government affairs, that he believed there was no immediate cause for concern.

Jefferiss noted that there will be ample opportunity for UK-focused CLC members (BP, Shell, Unilever) to input their perspectives and shape internal thinking on the report before it is published.

BP is also believed to have been offered the opportunity to work with the council on a communications strategy around the launch.

Jolyon Maugham, Director of the Good Law Project, said: While the BBC has laundered Policy Exchange as a centre-right and in the hands of charities and so-called regulators, the revealed reality is that Policy Exchange is behaving like a front for oil and oil. gas industry.

Policy Exchange, CLC and BP have been contacted for comment.

Another form of greenwashing

Climate experts are divided over whether the carbon tax policy is effective, and past scandals have led to accusations that the fossil fuel industry is using it as a smokescreen.

McGuire believes that a carbon tax is ultimately just another form of greenwashing and a medicine for environmental pollution. [oil] Division Critic.

But other experts, such as Adam Bell, policy director at consultancy Stonehaven and former head of strategy at the Department for Business, Energy and Industrial Strategy, believe a carbon tax could be effective.

Carbon pricing is only one part of a policy approach to combat climate change and is not a solution in itself. Fossil fuel companies will survive as long as there is demand for the products they produce. To eliminate this, you have to eliminate that demand.

To do that, he said, we need to focus on building out renewable energy and electrifying our heat systems and transportation.

The CLC has led calls for a federal carbon price in the U.S. and has been criticized in the past for attaching conditions to proposals that favor the fossil fuel industry. It previously proposed repealing federal emissions regulations, losing the Environmental Protection Agency's authority to regulate carbon emissions and giving corporations legal immunity from prosecution for their role in climate change.

The CLC removed the latter provision from its 2019 proposal because it diverted focus from many of the economic and environmental aspects of the plan, but critics questioned whether it remained privately committed to the idea.

In 2021, the CLC dropped Exxon from its list of founding members after one of Exxon's lobbyists was caught on camera saying the oil company had pledged to support a carbon tax because it was unlikely to become law.

The Policy Exchanges report similarly proposed phasing out some environmental regulations to reduce the regulatory burden on businesses following the introduction of a carbon tax, but argued that this would in no way reduce environmental protection.

In an afterword to the report, CLC founder Ted Halstead and Martin Feldstein and George P. Shultz, two economists who served in the Ronald Reagan administration, said the plan would free businesses from unnecessary regulation. I wrote that it would help me become free.

Extinction Rebellion spokesman Steve Tooze said: “This email is a smoking gun that blows a fatal hole in the already tattered and frankly ridiculous policy exchange that claims to be an independent research think tank.

policy exchange

Speaking at the 2022 Conservative Party conference, Jacob Rees-Mogg, then secretary for business, energy and industrial strategy, said: I believe that where policy exchange leads, governments often follow.

The think tank, a charity, has chosen not to disclose its donors and received the lowest ranking on openDemocracys Who Funds You? This is a project to evaluate the funding transparency of think tanks.

OpenDemocracy previously revealed that Exxon donated $30,000 to the US fundraising arm of Policy Exchanges in 2017, the same year the UK carbon pricing report was drafted.

The think tank is expected to produce a report in 2019 proposing tough new policing laws to crack down on climate protesters. Rishi Sunak later credited the policy exchange with helping the government draft what would become the Police, Crime, Sentencing and Courts Act, which explicitly targeted groups such as Extinction Rebellion.

Sunak is an alumnus of the Policy Exchange and worked there before the 2015 parliamentary elections, as is his energy security and net zero secretary, Claire Coutinho. The think tank has held more than 100 meetings with the government since 2012 and has significant contacts with ministers.

DeSmog joined Policy Exchange's high-level influence campaign on UK North Sea oil and gas policy in August 2023, highlighting the importance of hydrogen power generation and carbon capture utilization and storage (CCUS) to tackle the fossil fuel lobby. He said he reflected it. Green transition.

Evidence unearthed by U.S. politicians further demonstrates how big fossil fuel companies have been downplaying the climate crisis and lobbying against green laws, despite providing academic research showing the scale of the problem.

BP received a warning from Princeton University researchers in 2016 that climate change, accelerated in part by new global supplies of shale gas, could lead to catastrophic events such as mass extinctions and unprecedented famines.

But despite acknowledging internally concerns that gas does not support climate goals, the company has embarked on a marketing campaign to advance and protect gas and BP's role in the energy transition.

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