A LETTER calling on the Chancellor, Rachel Reeves, and the Foreign Secretary, David Lammy, to penalise fossil-fuel firms through taxation before this 12 months’s COP30 climate summit has been signed by the previous Archbishop of Canterbury Lord Williams and members of the C of E’s Environment Working Group.
Also signed by other UK faith leaders, the letter sets out how funds to tackle the climate crisis may very well be raised through financial penalties for net polluters.
The letter says: “Our shared message is: for those who are serious about delivering a clean energy transition, and motion to support communities hit by climate breakdown at home and abroad, you have to make polluters pay.”
Other signatories include the Bishop of Kingston, Dr Martin Gainsborough; the Church of England’s National Environment Officer, Jo Chamberlain; the Recording Clerk of Quakers in Britain, Paul Parker; and Dr Ruth Valerio, formerly of Tearfund.
A recent study by the research group Global Witness suggested that climate breakdown was projected to cause £1.1 trillion-worth of harm to the UK’s economy over the subsequent decade, amounting to £38,000 per household.
The climate-damage tax on fossil-fuel producers could raise £20 billion over ten years, while removing the subsidies for North Sea oil and gas would raise £2.2 billion a 12 months, and implementing a two-per-cent tax on assets exceeding £10 million could raise £24 billion a 12 months, the report says.
The signatories write: “In many faith systems, paying taxes is an element of the functioning of a just society. Christians see taxes as a tool to take care of the poor and love their neighbour. . . Support for climate motion and taxation as a method of contributing to the common good and caring for the natural world shouldn’t be just limited to people of religion.”
A Savanta poll commissioned by Christian Aid suggested that 4 in five (82 per cent) of the UK adults agreed that it was incorrect for oil and gas firms to make record profits without taking responsibility for damage brought on by their activities. Only 4 per cent disagreed.
As record temperatures proceed this summer, church leaders all over the world are stepping up their calls for climate motion before the COP30 talks in Brazil in November. The former Bishop of Grafton, Australia, the Rt Revd Philip Huggins, a past President of the country’s National Council of Churches, said that this 12 months was crucial, as countries were resulting from submit their latest five-year national climate plans under the Paris Agreement. These plans, Nationally Determined Contributions (NDCs), are intended to ratchet up the collective global effort to chop emissions every five years.
Bishop Huggins said: “We know continued international cooperation is so crucial to the repairing and sustaining of our planetary life. We need one another’s help. It was the inspiration of the Paris Agreement to provide us a transparent way by which we will cooperate. With each country’s more generous and impressive NDC, we keep alive the hope of containing the rise in global temperatures to that 1.5° goal. At a time of a lot despair and division, it’s such a blessing that we’ve got this easy, clear way by which we will restore hope and renew our cooperation, in gratitude to our Creator for all the sweetness and wonder of creation.”
