Fossil fuel behemoth BP made $13.8 billion in profits last year.

To put that number in context:

• Suppose you make the federal minimum wage of $7.25 an hour. (Yes, the federal minimum wage is still stuck where it was 15 years ago.)

• You work 40 hours a week, 52 weeks a year. (No vacation for you!)

• It would take 915,119 years to earn $13.8 billion. (And that could hardly be considered profits. You would have been scraping by. For almost a million years. Which is about three times longer than human beings have actually existed.)

Again, that’s $13.8 billion in profits, over and above the costs of running the business. But apparently it wasn’t enough for BP, whose profits were nearly double in 2022, at $27 billion.

BP’s new CEO recently admitted that the company intends to focus even more on dirty energy profits after dabbling in renewables. As he bluntly put it, “that’s investing into oil and gas.”

Let’s not forget that BP was behind the worst oil “spill” ever with its Deepwater Horizon catastrophe in 2010. (Seems like a really long time ago, right? Still not as long ago as the last time the federal minimum wage was increased. And this email isn’t even about the minimum wage.)

And, of course, climate chaos — brought about in large part by the myopic greed of multinational corporations like BP — is an existential threat to the Earth and everything that lives on it (including Big Oil CEOs and shareholders).

Some questions for BP’s new CEO, Murray Auchincloss:

$13.8 billion in profits in one year is not enough? You’re going to further imperil the climate and our very existence by pumping even more fossil fuels out of the Earth and even more carbon pollution into the atmosphere? Why not make your legacy be that of the oil company CEO who had the guts to say enough is enough? Or — since you’ve exposed your greed for all to see — can you at least stop pretending that you care about averting climate chaos and protecting the planet?

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