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To: Chancellor of the Exchequer, George Osborne
Give up on "every drop" of UK oil
In your Autumn Statement, you announced "radical" tax cuts for North Sea oil and gas companies. If the world follows suit, that means many degrees of climate change, for sure.
Please get real about climate change, UK leadership, and the signal you send to the rest of the world in your headlong pursuit of oil.
I ask you to backtrack on your reckless quest to drill "every drop" - and to increase, not decrease, taxes on the extraction of climate changing fossil fuels.
Why is this important?
The Chancellor has pledged to extract "every drop" of oil from the North Sea. If all countries in the world do this, we will head for runaway climate change of well over two degrees.
Oil resources are tempting. But leadership at home and abroad means all countries - particularly rich ones that have built their economies on a century of fossil fuel use - have to start making big choices.
The Chancellor has announced "radical" and "significant' cuts to the tax rate for North Sea oil and gas companies. But the rate of tax wasn't high enough in the first place: fossil fuels cause climate change and air pollution, yet companies don't pay anywhere near the full costs of the damage these cause.
The Chancellor should increase, not decrease, taxes on oil and gas, alongside throwing all of his financial and economic levers at building a world-leading secure, sustainable and clean energy system as a matter of urgency.
