'Twisted': BP and Shell CEOs See Pay Double as Workers Struggle to Heat Homes

Progressives are renewing their call to adequately tax Big Oil's windfall profits and executive bonuses after a pair of London-based fossil fuel giants reported that the pay packages of their CEOs doubled last year while working-class households suffered under the weight of soaring prices.

BP said Friday that its CEO Bernard Looney received $12.1 million in 2022, up from $5.4 million the previous year. His compensation package included a $2.9 million cash bonus and $7.3 million in company stock. BP's profits doubled last year to a record high of $28 billion.

The news came one day after Shell said that its former CEO, Ben van Beurden, took home $11.7 million in 2022, up from $7.9 million the previous year. His compensation package included a $3.1 million cash bonus and $5.9 million in company stock. Shell's profits doubled last year to an all-time high of $40 billion.

In the wake of Big Oil's record-breaking profitmaking in 2022—which came as Russia's invasion of Ukraine created chaos in global oil and gas markets, giving corporations a pretext to jack up prices—BP and Shell announced last month that they are weakening their emission-reduction targets and expanding fossil fuel production.

Climate scientists are emphatic that such decisions are, in the words of United Nations Secretary-General António Guterres, "inconsistent with human survival."

"While the rest of us struggle to pay our energy bills, the pay packages of fossil fuel giant bosses are doubling. Why are they allowed to profit from our misery?"

Fossil fuel corporations' ballooning profits and executive pay packages have provoked calls for far-reaching action to protect consumers from the high gas prices and electricity bills driving a historic cost-of-living crisis.

"Instead of allowing these huge payouts to end up in the pockets of CEOs, the government must step in with a proper tax on the oil industry and its profits, channel the money into stopping energy waste from homes, and invest in green heating schemes," Greenpeace U.K. campaigner Mel Evans told Reuters on Friday.

As many as 45 million people in the United Kingdom have struggled with fuel poverty this winter, and over the past decade, an estimated 7,409 Brits have died each year as a result of living in cold damp homes. This reality has prompted demands for the government to cover a greater share of people's skyrocketing utility bills, fund home insulation, and ramp up clean energy production—all of which would be made easier by enacting a stronger tax on Big Oil's windfall profits.

It's a "twisted irony" that a handful of wealthy executives got even richer "precisely because bills have been so unaffordable for the majority," Jonathan Noronha-Gant, a campaigner at the London-based advocacy group Global Witness, told The Associated Press on Friday.

Like Greenpeace, Global Witness has called for strengthening the U.K.'s loophole-ridden tax on Big Oil's windfall profits and imposing a tax on executive bonuses.

Global Witness said it would take the average British worker six centuries to earn the $23.8 million that BP's Looney and Shell's van Beurden made last year. Both CEOs make more than $100 every four minutes, the group added, meaning that it would take each one just eight minutes to earn the cost of a U.K. household's monthly energy bill and less than a day to earn the average annual U.K. wage.

"While the rest of us struggle to pay our energy bills, the pay packages of fossil fuel giant bosses are DOUBLING," Greenpeace U.K. tweeted Friday. "Why are they allowed to profit from our misery?"

New research commissioned by Britain's Liberal Democratic Party shows that the U.K. government provided $24.1 billion more in support to producers of planet-wrecking fossil fuels than to producers of renewables since 2015, The Guardian reported Thursday.

These subsidies have helped oil and gas giants realize record profits, which they use to block policies that would facilitate a green transition and rein in their destructive industry.

Liberal Democrats on Thursday called for a one-time "bonanza bonus" tax on energy company executives, AP reported.

According to the news outlet, "The proposed tax is similar to a levy on bankers' bonuses that the U.K. government imposed in 2009-10 amid the fallout of the global financial crisis."

"It is outrageous that oil and gas bosses are raking in millions in bonuses while families struggle to heat their homes," said party leader Ed Davey. "Whether it is executive bonuses or soaring profits, the money being made out of Putin's illegal war should be helping struggling families, not oil and gas barons."