PETITION: East Sussex County Council - We demand affordable green energy, not fossil fuels!

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Number of signatures as at 20 March 2023: 5,236
Total number needed to force debate at County Hall: 5,000

Soaring energy bills have already pushed millions of UK households into fuel poverty.

Meanwhile, the same giant oil & gas companies that are driving the climate emergency – companies like Shell and BP – are making vast profits out of the current crisis.   

Yet despite declaring a ‘climate emergency’ East Sussex County Council (ESCC) is still investing local people’s pensions in these companies and has rejected calls to support a proper windfall tax on them. (Oil companies operating in Norway pay a special permanent 56% tax, on top of corporation tax, reaping much greater revenues than in the UK.)  

We demand that ESCC stops investing in fossil fuels, and that it publicly supports a proper permanent windfall tax on Big Oil and a rapid transition to a system that provides affordable green energy for everyone.

(For more info and background see https://divesteastsussex.wordpress.com)

This petition is supported by: Divest East Sussex, Brighton Energy Cooperative, Friends of the Earth Brighton & Hove, Hastings & District Trades Council, Just Stop Oil - Sussex University, Lewes Climate Hub, Seaford Environmental Alliance, South East Climate Alliance, Transition Town Lewes, XR Eastbourne and XR Hastings & St Leonards.

Note added 17 November 2022: The new Chancellor (Jeremy Hunt) has just increased the rate of the government’s ‘windfall tax’ on the oil and gas companies to 35% (up from 25% under Sunak). However: (1) this will only be in effect until 2028, rather than permanently; and (2) even more importantly, this ‘windfall tax’ still contains the massive loophole that allowed Shell to pay zero windfall tax in the first three quarters of this year, despite record global profits.

Indeed, as Tessa Khan explains here:

‘Hunt has failed to close the gaping tax loophole that allows companies such as Shell to avoid tax if they invest in new oil and gas fields. It also gives them an even bigger handout if they choose to power their oil and gas rigs using wind – despite the fact that the vast majority of emissions come from burning, not extracting, oil. Not only will this see billions in lost tax, it sends us in precisely the opposite direction to the one that will get us out of this hole for good. This is the “highway to climate hell”, that the UN secretary general, António Guterres, warned world leaders about at Cop27. It is also the route to permanently high energy bills.’

Note added 3 February 2023: On 2 February Shell reported its highest ever annual profit, because of the surge in energy prices sparked by Russia's invasion of Ukraine. Yet despite making an annual adjusted profit of roughly $40 billion in 2022, it paid only $134mn in British windfall taxes, and only $520m in the EU's analogue of the windfall tax. According to Tessa Khan (see above) the current loophole in the UK's windfall tax on Big Oil & Gas 'amounts to us effectively giving £11 billion to oil & gas companies ... enough to make sure that every NHS worker and every teacher in the UK gets an inflation making pay rise'.

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