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climate crisis
38 Former World Leaders Have a Message: Tax Fossil Giants to Fight Climate Crisis
“Pressure is mounting on today’s politicians to hold those most responsible for the climate crisis to account," said one Greenpeace campaigner.
Sep 24, 2025
Thirty-eight former world leaders on Wednesday used the occasion of the United Nations General Assembly this week in New York—as well as other global summits on the horizon—to demand a new global framework for steeper taxes on the world's wealthiest and most powerful fossil fuel giants to pay for an urgent transition away from dirty energy sources toward a healthier planet and more equitable economy.
Under the auspices of the nonpartisan Club de Madrid, the world’s largest forum of former democratically-elected presidents and prime ministers, an open letter—signed by Carlos Alvarado, former President of Costa Rica; Mari Kiviniemi, former Prime Minister of Finland; Chandrika Kumaratunga, former President of Sri Lanka; former UN Secretary General Ban-Ki Moon; and dozens of others—calls the climate crisis "a defining challenge of our time" and urges current leaders to "place the question of fair taxation of fossil fuel company profits firmly on national and international agendas" before it is too late.
"With wealthier countries leading by example," say the leaders, increased taxation of the world's coal, oil, and gas giants coupled with a redirection of taxpayer subsidies away from the fossil fuel sector and toward a just renewable energy transition "could be transformative, enabling a faster and fairer global transition and strengthening public trust that climate action can deliver tangible benefits for all."
"Taxing fossil fuel profits is not only fair—it is also essential to ease the economic burden of the climate crisis, felt by ordinary people through higher food prices, lost working days, pressure on energy bills and higher home insurance premiums.”
Citing the need for global cooperation and ambition to address the warming planet and ongoing climate breakdown, the open letter states:
It is time to consider innovative solutions that can simultaneously establish a clear incentive for companies to shift investment to renewable energy as quickly as possible, while mobilising significant funds to address climate damages and advance both equality and equity. Today, we call on you to consider permanent polluter profit taxes applied to high-emitting industries, designed to ensure contributions come from those with the greatest capacity to pay rather than from ordinary consumers of fossil fuels. With wealthier countries leading by example, these taxes should place the primary responsibility on those with the greatest capacity, not on middle- and low-income communities.
The former world leaders acknowledge the strain governments feel about generating the necessary revenue, estimated at approximately $6.5 trillion per year by 2030, to fund the rapid transition scientists and experts say is necessary to avoid the worst future impacts of an increasingly hotter planet. However, they argue that the polluting companies that have profited most from the fossil fuel era are best positioned to foot the bill, and that the cost of action is far less than the cost of fixing the damage that future climate change will cause if left unaddressed.
"During the oil and gas price crisis in 2022, many governments implemented windfall taxes. We must consider making such approaches permanent," the letter argues. "A polluter profits tax modestly applied to normal returns and significantly higher on windfall gains could, if applied just to oil, coal, and gas companies, generate up to $400 billion in its first year."
Rebecca Newsom, Greenpeace International's global political lead for its "Stop Drilling Start Paying" campaign, said the letter represents what real leadership looks like and that forcing fossil fuel giants to pay higher taxes to help solve the planetary crisis their insatiable greed has spurred has never been more popular with the people worldwide.
"This is a powerful call from former world leaders to make oil and gas corporations pay their fair share for the destruction they have caused," said Newsom.
Noting recent survey data, Newsom said 8 out of 10 people around the world now "support taxing these polluters for climate damages—the backing of former political leaders adds more weight to this urgent demand."
“Pressure is mounting on today’s politicians to hold those most responsible for the climate crisis to account," she said. "Taxing fossil fuel profits is not only fair—it is also essential to ease the economic burden of the climate crisis, felt by ordinary people through higher food prices, lost working days, pressure on energy bills and higher home insurance premiums.”
With the upcoming G20 summit in South Africa and the UN Global Tax Convention in Kenya, both scheduled for November, the former world leaders say the moment is right for global leaders to finally show urgency on the issue.
"The world has the tools, the knowledge, and the resources to act," their letter concludes. "What is needed now is the political courage to ensure that those with the greatest capacity contribute their fair share. This will not only advance climate justice but also strengthen the foundations of a more stable, resilient, and prosperous global economy."
Greenpeace's Newsom said the message is clear. "Governments must find the courage to decisively tax oil and gas corporations and redirect those funds towards a just transition away from fossil fuels and a safe future in the face of a climate crisis.”
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A Year After the Summit of the Future, Future Generations Thinking Is Still the Answer
For our democracies to function we need to repair the social contract between generations and work toward such a shared vision of the future.
Sep 22, 2025
On this day last year, I was at the United Nations Summit of the Future in New York where world leaders agreed a global Pact to “safeguard the future.”
The Pact for the Future, adopted by the UN General Assembly, lists 56 actions governments have committed to. These cover peace and security, sustainable development, science and technology, youth, and global governance—all with the ultimate goal of protecting the needs and interests of present and future generations.
The challenges are immense. As the preamble to the pact states, “If we do not change course, we risk tipping into a future of persistent crisis and breakdown.” But to start to confront the challenges, we need multilateral cooperation for the long term and the pact provides a foundation for this.
I left the US feeling hopeful.
We all must remind ourselves that someday we will be the past generations and it’s our decisions now that will shape the future.
A year on, it’s hard to hold on to that sense of hope. The world feels like a very different place this September compared with last.
Could such a summit even take place in 2025? Given US President Donald Trump’s "my way or the highway" approach to international diplomacy and his weaponization of tariffs in trade relation; and given the lack of progress toward negotiating a ceasefire in Ukraine and ending the genocide in Palestine, it’s hard to imagine a diplomatic consensus being found today on leaving a better world for future generations.
This downward spiral of the last 12 months makes the pact even more precious.
Amid all the chaos and conflict in the world, with war raging, famine, extreme weather events, and the very fabric of our democracies coming apart at the seams, these commitments provide a vision to hold on to.
For our democracies to function we need to repair the social contract between generations and work toward such a shared vision of the future. Participation in democracy is key across generations—for individuals to say what their priorities are and choose representatives to act on the things they care about. However, participation isn’t equal across generations, and thus nor is representation.
In the 2024 US presidential election, voter turnout was lowest for the 18-24 age group; less than half of citizens in this age bracket voted. By contrast, the highest turnout was among 65-74 year-olds, three-quarters of whom voted. Similar voting patterns can be observed internationally.
It is natural that younger people are reluctant to participate in democracy when they feel governments are not acting in their longer-term interests—the climate crisis being the prime example. To build trust, governments need to show that they are listening and find ways to bring the voices of young people and future generations into decision-making processes.
Creating common visions about a desired future gives governments a goal to work toward. Having a clear vision helps them design policies knowing what direction they want to move in. Having broad, diverse participation can give them the support of the people.
Future generations governance uses co-creative and participatory methods, as well as tools like strategic foresight, to drive toward shared visions.
While it might feel like it, it’s not all doom and gloom in the world today.
Away from the front pages and social media feeds work is being done in different places to strengthen long-term thinking and the consideration of future generations in decisions.
Wales continues to be a leader. Its independent Future Generations Commissioner has existed since 2015 to support and challenge the Welsh government to represent the interests of those not yet born. This role was a result of a participative visioning process with citizens which set out in a legal Act seven well-being goals to “create a Wales that we all want to live in, now and in the future.”
Here in Europe, we have high hopes for the European Union’s first ‘intergenerational fairness’ strategy. Last year the bloc appointed its first Commissioner for Intergenerational Fairness responsible for “making sure decisions taken today do not harm future generations.” Their work has the potential to provide a home for long-term thinking in the EU system and to ensure the interests of future generations are respected throughout EU policymaking.
Still under development, the strategy has had a huge amount of input from experts and citizens—myself included.
Another country setting a precedent is Norway. Earlier this year it convened a national citizens assembly to discuss how—as one of the richest countries in the world—it can use its wealth to benefit the world, Norwegians, and future generations. One of the resulting recommendations in as independent Commissioner to ensure that future generations have a voice in decision-making.
Outside Europe, the Australian parliament created a cross-party group for future generations, and Cameroon has created an Indigenous Commission for Future Generations.
Developments like these—at different levels, in different parts of the world—are how the long-term vision set out last year at the UN will be implemented on the ground.
We all must remind ourselves that someday we will be the past generations and it’s our decisions now that will shape the future.
A year ago today global leaders committed us to becoming good ancestors—future generations will be the judges of whether we succeed.
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'A Mockery of Science': Experts Slam Trump DOE's Climate Report in New Paper
"The goal is clear," said one of the experts. "To justify inaction and avoid meaningful emissions reductions."
Sep 02, 2025
The US Department of Energy's July climate report is "biased, full of errors, and not fit to inform policymaking," according to a comprehensive review released Tuesday by a group of 85 scientists who reviewed the document independently.
The department's "Climate Working Group" drew up the report as part of the effort by US President Donald Trump to fatally undermine the Environmental Protection Agency's (EPA) determination, commonly known as the "endangerment finding," that greenhouse gases like carbon dioxide and methane endanger human lives by warming the planet.
"If successful," Andrew Dessler, a climate scientist at Texas A&M, says, "this move could unravel virtually every US climate regulation on the books, from car emissions standards to power plant rules."
The Energy Department's nearly 150-page paper, titled "A Critical Review of the Impacts of Greenhouse Gas Emissions on the US Climate." Dessler describes its five authors as "climate contrarians who dispute mainstream science." The team behind the report, he argues, was "hand-picked" by Energy Secretary Chris Wright to lend legitimacy to the Trump administration's predetermined conclusions about climate science.
The DOE report's five authors seek to contradict the much more rigorous analyses conducted by groups like the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC), whose reports have been written by over a thousand researchers and which cite tens of thousands of academic studies.
The multinational panel has concluded that human fossil fuel usage has considerably warmed the planet, causing increased amounts of extreme weather, threatening food and water security, destroying ecosystems, and risking dangerous amounts of sea-level rise.
The Energy Department's report advances the main idea that climate scientists like those at the IPCC broadly "overstate" the extent of the human-caused climate crisis as well as its risks. Unlike other research of its kind, the department crafted its report in secret, which prompted the expert response.
"Normally, a report like this would undergo a rigorous, unbiased, and transparent peer review," said Dr. Robert Kopp, a climate and sea-level researcher at Rutgers. "When it became clear that DOE wasn't going to organize such a review, the scientific community came together on its own, in less than a month, to provide it."
Their review found that the Energy Department's report "exhibits pervasive problems with misrepresentation and selective citation of the scientific literature, cherry-picking of data, and faulty or absent statistics."
For instance, the report claims that there is "no obvious acceleration in sea-level rise" even though the number of days of high-tide coastal flooding per year has increased more than 10-fold since the 1970s.
It also attempts to portray CO2 emissions as a net benefit to the environment, particularly agriculture, by pointing to its benefits for crop growth, but ignores that the impact of increased droughts and wildfires far outweighs those benefits.
And it attempts to pick out isolated historical weather events like the Dust Bowl during the 1930s as evidence that dramatic climatic changes happen very frequently within short amounts of time and that the unprecedented increase in global temperatures over the past century and a half is not worthy of alarm.
"My reading of the report uncovered numerous errors of commission and omission, all of which slant toward a conclusion that human-caused climate change poses no serious risks," said Kerry Emmanuel, a meteorologist and climate scientist who specializes in hurricane physics. "It seems to work backward from a desired outcome."
Dessler notes that over 99% of the literature included in the IPCC's report was simply ignored by the Department of Energy. He described the report as a "mockery of science" akin to a "Soviet show trial."
"The outcome of this exercise by the Department of Energy is already known: climate science will be judged too uncertain to justify the endangerment finding," he said. "Once you understand that, everything about the DOE report makes total sense."
In 2025, the US National Weather Service issued a record number of flash flood warnings, while 255 million Americans were subject to life-threatening triple-digit temperatures in June. The previous year, 48 of 50 US states faced drought conditions, the most ever recorded in US history, while nearly 9 million acres burned due to wildfires.
"We live in a world where the impacts of climate change are increasingly being felt by citizens all around the globe—including communities throughout the US," said Andra Gardner, a professor of environmental science at Rowan University.
"This is perhaps what makes the DOE Climate Working Group report most astounding," she continued. "In a country where we have the tools to not only understand the impacts of climate change but also to begin meaningfully combating the crisis, the current DOE has instead decided to promote fossil fuel interests that will further worsen the symptoms of climate change with a report that turns a blind eye to the established science."
According to an analysis from Climate Power published in January, oil and gas industry donors gave $96 million in direct donations to the campaign of Donald Trump and affiliated super PACs during the 2024 election, while spending $243 million to lobby Republicans in Congress.
The result has been an administration that has purged climate science information from federal websites, laid off thousands of EPA employees, and gutted government funding for wind and solar energy.
Becca Neumann, an associate professor in the Civil and Environmental Engineering Department at the University of Washington, says that "the goal" of the report "is clear: to justify inaction and avoid meaningful emissions reductions."
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