Our organization was founded to counter the vilification of taxation. We saw taxation as a vital social mechanism, and we wanted to be able to have adult conversations about it. We certainly never wanted to vilify taxation in and of itself, but I sometimes think about corporate profits as being like a tax that gets paid to private sector actors rather than to our public institutions. The large increase in corporate profit margins in some way is just like a large increase in taxes, except, instead of going into public institutions to then be used in ways to benefit the public, it goes into private hands and then gets distributed to the shareholders, who are overwhelmingly at the upper end of our economic hierarchy.
Increasing profit margins from something as essential, as you say, as fossil fuels are going to end up increasing the costs of pretty much every other business, some of which will be able to pass those costs along, some of which will be able to pass those costs along less and some of which will have to just simply absorb those costs. This is really a redistributive struggle playing out, with the oil and gas companies as the big winners. One of the consequences we're seeing of this is that the big global players, three of them—Shell, BP, and I cannot remember the third—have basically said they're all going to back away from their promised investments in clean energy to go even harder at further development of fossil fuels.
We're heading in the exact wrong direction. The huge profits these companies are making are sending us in the wrong direction, and we need to consider tax mechanisms as a way of helping us move in the right direction. If these players are not going to make the investment in clean energy that we need, then we need government to lead with the investment that's necessary and use tax mechanisms as a way of funding those.