The head of one of the world’s largest oil companies is urging authorities to take from the rich to help the poor.
As the cost of gas skyrockets in the UK and across Europe, “one way or another, there needs to be government intervention,” Shell CEO Ben van Beurden said at the Energy Intelligence Forum in London on October. 4, quoted by Bloomberg. “A government intervention that somehow results in protecting the poorest, that probably may then mean that governments need to tax people in this room to pay for it.”
Executives from the energy sector’s largest companies, including from oil and gas majors Saudi Aramco, ExxonMobil, and Chevron, among others, are in attendance at the two-day conference, which concludes on Oct. 6. A Shell spokesperson told Reuters van Beurden’s statement on taxation referred to companies, not individuals.
At the UN general assembly last month, UN secretary general António Guterres urged developed countries to tax the windfall profits of oil and gas companies, and use the money to combat loss and damage caused by the climate crisis as well as to assist people struggling with rising food and energy prices.
A similar message was shared by the United Nations Conference on Trade and Development (UNCTAD), which criticized central banks’ rapid increases in interest rates as pushing the global economy to the edge of recession. UNCTAD encouraged policymakers to use other tools to control inflation, such as windfall taxes, price controls, and antitrust measures.
source quartz