Forcing companies that extract gas from Australian waters to pay royalties and a tax upon their surging profits would comfortably add $60 billion to the budget bottom line in coming years, independent modelling finds.
Gas leak: The massive cost of not taxing companies revealed
British energy giant BP’s earnings have tripled in the second quarter as the company profited from oil and natural gas prices that soared after Russia invaded Ukraine.
London-based BP said on Tuesday that underlying replacement cost profit, which excludes one-time items and fluctuations in the value of inventories, jumped to $US8.45 billion ($A12.21 billion) from $US2.8 billion ($A4 billion) in the same period a year earlier.
The soaring earnings allowed BP to return billions of dollars to shareholders, with the company boosting its dividend by 10 per cent and announcing it would buy back $US3.5 billion ($A5.1 billion) in shares.
BP earnings triple on rising energy prices – Michael West
It is useful to think of capitalism as a robotic savant, spectacularly gifted at doing one thing and cripplingly blind to everything else. Global capitalism is an incredible machine for extracting fossil fuels from our planet, refining them, shipping them to every corner of the Earth and making staggering amounts of money doing so. The humming of this machine, the fuel and the money that it spits out, has powered a century of unprecedented production and consumption by the Earth’s first-world nations. Unfortunately the machine is also poisoning us all. But one of its exquisitely evolved functions is to make it almost impossible to turn it off.
The world is ablaze and the oil industry just posted record profits. It’s us or them | Hamilton Nolan | The Guardian
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