Why Global Tax Reform Must Target Big Oil’s Record-Breaking Profits

Big Oil's $90 Billion and the Fights We Can't Afford to Lose

As 350.org reported this week, those same corporations are now driving the droughts, wildfires, and heatwaves dismantling public budgets across the Global South — and the institutions that should be taxing them out of existence are, instead, negotiating the pace at which they get to keep doing it.

At the close of the fifth session of UN Tax Convention negotiations in New York, climate campaigners made the demand obvious: impose a global tax on fossil fuel profits, channel the revenue to communities bearing climate damages and to households crushed by spiking energy bills, and use the rest to fund a fast, fair transition off the companies currently setting the world on fire. The mechanism exists. The money exists. What's missing is the political nerve to make extraction pay its way.

What New York Actually Decided

The talks, according to 350.org, moved in the right direction — which in UN language often means a few correct words were added to a draft that powerful governments want kept structurally toothless. Several rich countries attempted to stall progress by sidelining proposals that would reallocate taxing rights to developing countries and refusing to meaningfully engage with stronger environmental taxation provisions.

That detail tells you exactly whom the treaty is built to protect. When the nations most exposed to climate collapse ask for sovereign taxing authority over the corporations driving that collapse, they are told to wait. The text is set to be finalized in 2027, with negotiations resuming in December. Civil society groups say they intend to push a binding "polluters pay" principle onto the table before then — and into a legal instrument that, if adopted, could become a permanent collection mechanism on the profits of the world's biggest fossil fuel companies.

The Structural Block

The opposition here is not ideological. It is arithmetic. As Josh Bayly of Consumers International put it, "Affordability stands out as the top consumer concern worldwide. Spiking energy and food prices have turned essential daily activities like cooking a meal or using the air conditioner into a dilemma for ordinary households. Globally, consumer trust in fossil fuel companies is low, and the outstanding profits they just posted only deepens this distrust." A windfall tax on excess fossil fuel profits would ease that burden directly — which is precisely why the industry lobby and the governments it finances are working overtime to keep any such mechanism voluntary, weak, or simply unreached.

We have spent three decades subsidizing, deregulating, and underwriting the very sector now liquefying the conditions of ordinary life. The UN Tax Convention is a flawed, real opportunity to invert that arrangement. Our leaders must not squander the chance to put that wealth where it belongs — into building a safer and more livable planet, not a hotter and more destructive one. What's on the table in December is whether extraction finally pays its bill, or whether the bill gets passed to the rest of us, again.