Lord Browne: the man who went from BP and the North Sea to net zero

theguardian.com:

John Browne is used to being an oil industry contrarian. It’s 25 years since the former BP chief executive made the landmark speech to his alma mater at Stanford University in which he became the first leader from Big Oil to link hydrocarbon emissions and climate change. He was denounced by many in his trade. “I was told I had left the oil industry church; I hadn’t realised there was one,” he says drily.

Now Lord Browne of Madingley is at odds with his former peers again, agreeing with Rishi Sunak’s windfall tax on North Sea oil and gas operators to help fund a £15bn cost-of-living package for households. Current BP chief Bernard Looney’s handling of the public debate has been so clumsy that the tax is being called the “Looney levy”.

“It’s right and proper: those windfalls belong to the nation, not to companies,” says Browne. “I’ve had windfall taxes exercised on me by many jurisdictions in many places.”

However, the crossbench peer warns: “Profits should be taxed, but costs need to be thought through very carefully because you should get the ability to write off your capital as you go forward, as well as your operating costs. And designing a system which allows you to do all that properly – it has always been complex. When you add a windfall profits tax on top, we just need to be careful how you do it.”

He remembers a windfall tax in the early 1980s which led to companies paying more than 100% tax. “The government took forever to get it organised and didn’t trust anybody to tell them what the price of oil was, so fixed the tax higher than it was. So there are issues like that: the costs need to be thought through. But I think it’s right to be helping people with their bills.”

His conveniently timed conversion to the cause of