The true hardships in 2024 came for people struggling with sky-high bills, and those in climate-vulnerable communities.
BP and Shell’s combined 2024 profits are more than double the amount of the UK’s climate finance commitments, new analysis from NGO Global Justice Now has found.
The combined total of Shell and BP’s profits over 2024 amount to £26.2 billion. In contrast, the UK has committed to spending £11.6 billion on international climate finance between the financial years from April 2021 and April 2025.
Izzie McIntosh, the climate campaign manager at Global Justice Now, said: “When two fossil fuel companies together can earn over £26 billion in one year alone, we really have gone through the looking glass.
Pledge
"The true hardships in 2024 came for people struggling with sky-high bills, and those in climate-vulnerable communities who’ve lost loved-ones, homes and more to fire and floods, largely thanks to the production and burning of fossil fuels.
“If this government wants to increase its popularity at home and abroad, it should be taxing fossil fuel giants to pay for ambitious climate finance commitments, and for the costs of a just green transition that takes our energy production away from polluting mega-corporations and into our own hands.”
Developing countries criticised rich countries including the UK for failing to pledge adequate climate financing during the UNFCCC COP29 climate conference in November. The agreed pledge of $300 billion a year by 2035 was described as falling far below the $1.3 trillion a year many say is required.
Finance
The Independent High-Level Expert Group on Climate Finance previously stated that rich countries should contribute around $1.3 trillion by 2035, warning that “The less the world achieves now, the more we will need to invest later”.
Rich countries are overstating the “true value” of climate finance by up to $88 billion by providing 70 per cent of climate finance in loans and not grants in 2022, analysis by Oxfam had previously found.
The UK government has also previously been accused of “double counting” climate finance after making several definitional changes to what counts towards the climate finance goal.
This Author
Brendan Montague is editor of The Ecologist.
