After Hormuz, Nepal and wildfires, people demand action to make polluters pay

Anne Jellema is executive director of 350.org; Mads Christensen is executive director of Greenpeace International; and Amitabh Behar is executive director of Oxfam International.

On Monday, global petitions with a collective total of more than 2 million signatures were presented to the United Nations, calling on governments to introduce binding mechanisms to make fossil-fuel companies and the super-rich contribute to the costs of the damage they have created.

The petition signatures were received by Selwin Hart, the UN Assistant Secretary-General for Climate Action, in New York during the UN General Assembly, sending a clear message to governments: there is no more room for excuses.

If governments are serious about resilience, energy security and protecting people from an increasingly unstable world, they must make the companies profiting from the fossil-fuel economy pay their fair share. Because the crisis we are facing is no longer some distant threat. It is unfolding in real time, and it is exposing the extraordinary costs of an economy still built around fossil fuels.

For more than six months, the Strait of Hormuz, the channel through which a fifth of the world’s oil once flowed without a second thought, has been closed, contested or effectively unusable. Tankers sit at anchor. Insurance premiums have gone through the roof. Petrol pumps from Los Angeles to Lagos have felt the tremor. It has taken a war to remind the world just how much of our daily lives still rests on a single, fragile artery of fossil fuels.

At the other end of the same emergency, a glacier came down on the Nepal–China border in the last week of August. A wall of ice, rock and water tore through the Bhote Koshi and Langtang valleys. It has been described as one of the deadliest disasters in the region’s modern history, unfolding in a landscape where the world’s glaciers are retreating and destabilising at a pace scientists have been warning about for years.

And this came only weeks after hundreds of thousands of people were displaced — not by ice, but by fire. Europe has experienced its worst wildfire season in more than a decade. Homes have been lost across Spain, Portugal, France, Greece and the UK. Firefighters and civilians have been killed battling the blazes, while damage and reconstruction costs continue to reach extraordinary levels.

These are not separate crises. They are different expressions of a world becoming more volatile, while the fossil-fuel economy continues to generate enormous profits for those at the top and pushes the costs onto everyone else.

Communities absorbing cost

Because the crisis we are facing is no longer some distant threat. It is unfolding in real time, and it is exposing the extraordinary costs of an economy still built around fossil fuels. One thread runs through all of these events: a global economy still organised around the profits of a fossil fuel industry that has known, for decades, exactly what it was doing to the planet.

At a moment when governments are gathering in New York for the UN General Assembly to talk about security, resilience and economic competitiveness, it is worth spelling out what “security” – or the lack of it, driven by our economy’s dependence on oil – actually means this year for ordinary people around the world: 35,000 excess deaths in Europe due to heat; the highest food prices in three and a half years; $700 billion in economic losses, threatening countless jobs and livelihoods, from a war and a closed oil chokepoint whose consequences are nowhere near over.

Meanwhile the companies that extracted, refined, shipped and sold the fuel behind all of this continue to report extraordinary profits. Households are paying more for energy. Governments are spending billions on disaster response, on reconstruction, on emergency deployments of firefighters and aid. Communities are absorbing the cost of a system they didn’t design and don’t control. We pay. They profit.

This is not a coincidence, and it is not inevitable. It is a political choice, repeated year after year, to let the companies most responsible for the climate crisis hoard the wealth they generate while the rest of us carry the risk.

Taxes and fines needed

That is why, together with communities and campaigners in dozens of countries have spent the last three years building the case for a simple, overdue idea: polluters should pay for the damage they have caused. Not through voluntary pledges or distant net-zero promises, but through binding mechanisms, climate damages taxes, surtaxes on fossil fuel profits, and fines ring-fenced for recovery and adaptation that put real money where the harm actually is. This is how we take the profit out of destruction and protect the generations to come.

The response has told us we are not alone in thinking this. Our petitions calling on governments to make polluters pay have now gathered a collective total of over 2 million signatures from people across every region of the world.

The case for making polluters pay has moved into the mainstream

That is not a fringe demand. It is what happens when people watch a choke-point war spike their fuel bill, watch a glacier take a thousand lives, watch their own summer holidays rearranged by fire. They draw the obvious conclusion: the people who caused this should be paying for it – not profiting from it.

We hear the objection already forming: that this is not the moment, with wars underway and economies fragmenting, to burden industry further. We would say the opposite is true. If governments can mobilise trillions for war, for bailouts and for new fossil fuel infrastructure, they can mobilise the political will to tax the companies that caused this crisis.

Money for clean energy and resilience

That money can go straight to the people paying for it, through cheaper, cleaner, more secure energy, and through funding for communities on the frontline of floods, fires and glacial collapse. There isn’t an excuse left. There is only a choice about where power and money go next. Every dollar we don’t spend now on adaptation, resilience and cutting emissions, we burn many times over later: on disasters we could have prevented and economies we scramble to fix too late.

This year’s UNGA should be the moment that choice gets made in public. Governments arriving in New York will talk about resilience, about energy security, about protecting their citizens from an unstable world. Let them explain on the record why a fossil fuel industry that has spent decades profiting from that instability should not be the one paying to fix it so wrecking the planet no longer pays off.

The fires, floods and storms won’t just go away. The system that keeps producing these disasters, and keeps paying the same companies for the privilege, will not change itself unless political leaders step up. It is on all of us to make sure they hear, as loudly as possible, that the time for excuses has run out.

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