Oil: profits soar, the climate bill heads South

Three major European oil companies announced on Thursday 29 October sharply higher profits for the third quarter, reports the Financial Times, cited by Courrier international (the French weekly that digests foreign press). According to the latter, this windfall will go mostly to shareholders, in the form of dividends and share buybacks. Greenpeace is calling "without delay" for an EU tax on windfall profits.

That's the facts. The file in front of us gives neither the amounts, nor the names of the three groups, nor the exact share returned to shareholders. We won't invent them. What follows is our reading, not an established finding.

That reading comes down to one question: where does the money go, and where does the bill go? The profits, for their part, have an address: the shareholders. Share buybacks have the charming quality of building nothing, except the value of the stock. Not a wind turbine, not a dyke, not a hospital. The champagne in the Courrier international headline is therefore not just an image: it is an accounting entry.

The bill, however, travels. Contemporary Marxists speak of a "metabolic rift": accumulation always demands more energy and materials, and pushes its costs onto ecosystems and onto the populations who have contributed least to emissions. Applied here, the idea is simple. When a profitable quarter turns into dividends in Europe, the droughts, floods and lost harvests show up elsewhere, often in Southern countries that debt already prevents from protecting themselves. Nothing in our dispatch documents these specific impacts; it is the mechanism we are highlighting, not a particular case.

There is a legacy here too. Amílcar Cabral saw imperialism as "piracy transplanted from the seas to the mainland" (our translation, L'arme de la théorie), designed to exploit the natural and human resources of our peoples. Today's oil majors are not corsairs, let's not exaggerate: they pay their taxes, at least those that are demanded of them. But the structure remains: wealth concentrates at the centre, risk is spread to the periphery. And dependency theory reminds us that debt, unequal exchange and conditional loans keep that position locked in.

Is the tax demanded by Greenpeace the answer? It would be a start, not a programme. Taxing without saying who benefits from the money risks seeing it dissolve into national budgets in the North. The real question is one of transfers: financing adaptation and transition for those who are suffering, without attaching the usual conditions. That is where the credibility of European governments will be tested, governments that love to talk about climate justice as long as it stays in the conditional tense.

What we do not yet know: whether governments will answer the call, and what share of these profits will be reinvested in the transition. In the meantime, the bridge is listing, and the music plays on.