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Surging profits across the oil industry, while Europe grapples with wildfires and drought, is prompting a strong backlash from environmental campaigners.
Angharad Hopkinson, a political campaigner at Greenpeace, says:
We’ve just experienced the driest July on record and BP has driven record-breaking droughts, unprecedented wildfires and extraordinary excess heatwave deaths. To cause this destruction while amassing $5.7bn in profits shows how corporate gains have become entirely divorced from the public good – ordinary people are feeling the heat when it should be the polluters paying the price.
Prolonging this parasitic relationship by trying to squeeze the last few drops of expensive oil out of the North Sea is sheer folly – perhaps the one point on which we agree with BP.
Clearly not everyone is feeling the pain of the energy crisis. While BP banks another round of enormous profits, millions of households are paying the price through sky-high energy bills and a climate crisis accelerating rapidly out of control with increasingly severe heatwaves, wildfires and droughts.
The only way to protect people from soaring bills and climate chaos is to break our dependence on costly and polluting oil and gas by investing in energy efficiency and homegrown renewable power. Andy Burnham must back measures that make companies like BP pay more for the damage they are causing and use that money to speed up the transition to a cleaner, fairer and more secure future.”
They’re making too much money based on a shortage. I don’t like it.
Chevron, too much money. ExxonMobil, too much money,. They’re going to give some of that back to the public and they better cut the retail price, the consumer price.”
7am BST: Flutter interim results, BP Q2, HSBC Q2, Metro Bank Q2
10am BST: Eurozone unemployment data
9pm BST: SpaceX Q2 first earnings report since its record-breaking IPO
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