BP Is Calling for a Carbon Tax, Having Just Blocked a Carbon Tax

Hardly a week goes by without more nerve-shredding news of the climate-based crisis facing humanity. The only response seems to be indifference from politicians and directionless catastrophism from the press. Welcome to "Some Like It Hot", a column about environmental ruin that doesn't just say, "Oh god we're all screwed", but also: "and here's why".

For most of his life, Romeo, a Sehuencas water frog, lived alone.

Scientists believed he was the last of his kind, and so kept him in a conservation centre in Bolivia. Think of all the perks that must have come with. An aquarium all to himself. Free, personalised healthcare. Flies on tap.

That's all changed now.

On a trek through a remote cloud forest in Bolivia, scientists found Romeo his Juliet. A lady Sehuencas water frog. Now, they'll plop her into Romeo's tank and watch intently to see if they get off with each other. Cute.

But what are they going to talk about? Romeo has been living in a tank for ten years. What are his interests? His chat is going to be so embarrassingly weak.

"There is always risk in bringing animals in from the wild to build an insurance population," explained Chris Jordan of Global Wildlife Conservation. Well, yeah. Juliet's seen the world. Now she's living with a frog who's been in solitary confinement for a decade.

I can't have been the only one who found this "loneliest frog in the world" story kind of sad. Coming in the same week that the Guardian published a story about the global "insect collapse", this tale of star-croaked lovers seemed like the cuddly side of mass extinction.

Seventy-five percent of flying insects on German nature reserves have disappeared in the last 25 years. Things have also been rough for birds in Australia's eucalyptus forests. In October, WWF released a report estimating that 60 percent of all birds, fish, mammals and reptiles had been lost since 1970, driven in part by rapid increases in human consumption.

"We are essentially destroying the very life support systems that allow us to sustain our existence on the planet, along with all the other life on the planet," scientist Brad Lister told the Guardian, after returning from Puerto Rico's rainforest and finding 98 percent of ground insects had vanished from the area in the last 35 years.

It's easy to nervously laugh this stuff off as just "more signs of the apocalypse". Easier still for someone like me to write an excoriating paragraph chastising you for that nervous laugh and for eating meat and using plastic. "Hate orangutans, do you? Or do you just like Nutella more? I mean, seriously," etc, etc.

But the truth is that Puerto Rican bugs aren't dying because you always forget to take your Bag for Life to Lidl. Or because you eat meat sometimes, or use a straw every now and again. Climate change is a systemic problem, driven by some of the wealthiest people in society and the world's largest corporations.

That's not to say that small changes can’t help. You should eat less meat. You shouldn’t eat blueberries in January, flown in from New Zealand. But ultimately, we’re not in this mess just because we can’t be arsed to change. People change their habits all the time, but those moves are driven by innovation and regulatory change, not individual shifts. No one gets around by horse and cart anymore. Equally, no one drives cars with leaded petrol.

In the same week the insect collapse story came out, the Climate Leadership Council organised a statement calling for the immediate introduction of a carbon tax in the United States. The plan would put a price on CO2 emissions with a view to eventually making burning fossil fuels prohibitively expensive. If it costs too much to burn fossil fuels, we'll eventually stop burning them – or so the logic goes.

The Council calls for a tax to be introduced on every good or service using carbon in the US, with a view to eventually paying the money recuperated back to citizens as a rebate.

Sounds alright. But who backs the Climate Leadership Council? Well, among others, BP. In fact, the oil giant is one of its founding corporate members.

Now, it's odd for BP to call for the introduction of a carbon tax when – as reported in this column in November – they spent more than $11.5 million (£8.8. million) defeating a move to create one in Washington state just a few months ago.

You'd think if BP wanted a carbon tax so badly, they’d try not to spend millions making sure one didn't come into law – but maybe they got confused. Or maybe they think can gain respectability by pushing for a measure that is politically impossible (Donald Trump is not going to introduce a nationwide carbon tax anytime soon), while quashing efforts that might actually happen, like the Washington ballot initiative.

BP spokesman Jason Ryan said his company supports action to combat climate change, but strongly opposes the Washington ballot initiative because it believes it would disrupt the state’s economy without significantly reducing carbon emissions. "It is a poorly designed policy," he said.

Companies support half-hearted initiatives to stay respectable, while millions of years of evolution go up in smoke. Is this how the world ends? Not with a bang, but with thousands of froggy Romeos dying alone in captivity? It could be if big oil fails to kick its bad habits.

Joe Sandler Clarke is a reporter with Unearthed.