A LETTER calling on the Chancellor, Rachel Reeves, and the Foreign Secretary, David Lammy, to penalise fossil-fuel firms through taxation before this year’s COP30 climate summit has been signed by the former 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 could be raised through financial penalties for net polluters.
The letter says: “Our shared message is: if you are serious about delivering a clean energy transition, and action to support communities hit by climate breakdown at home and abroad, you must 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 damage to the UK’s economy over the next 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 year, and implementing a two-per-cent tax on assets exceeding £10 million could raise £24 billion a year, the report says.
The signatories write: “In many faith systems, paying taxes is part of the functioning of a just society. Christians see taxes as a tool to care for the poor and love their neighbour. . . Support for climate action and taxation as a means of contributing to the common good and caring for the natural world is not just limited to people of faith.”
A Savanta poll commissioned by Christian Aid suggested that four in five (82 per cent) of the UK adults agreed that it was wrong for oil and gas companies to make record profits without taking responsibility for damage caused by their activities. Only four per cent disagreed.
As record temperatures continue this summer, church leaders around the world are stepping up their calls for climate action 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 year was crucial, as countries were due to submit their new 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 cut 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 each other’s help. It was the inspiration of the Paris Agreement to give us a clear way by which we can cooperate. With each country’s more generous and ambitious NDC, we keep alive the hope of containing the rise in global temperatures to that 1.5° target. At a time of so much despair and division, it is such a blessing that we have this simple, clear way by which we can restore hope and renew our cooperation, in gratitude to our Creator for all the beauty and wonder of creation.”