Back in early February, which feels like a different age, BP and Shell were unveiling joint profits of around £40 billion.
The usual crews of anti-poverty campaigners and environmentalists said these returns were obscene and much else besides.
There should be a windfall tax on those profits, with the money handed to those struggling with energy bills (the way it is going, that looks like being all of us).
Back then, weeks before Russia started bombing Ukraine, it looked like a reasonable idea.
The rising profits are just a function of the oil price. It’s not like Shell or BP did anything very clever; why not tax the profits?
Yesterday in the US the admirable Senator Elizabeth Warren, a noted and fierce consumer champion, returned to the idea. She tweeted: “Big Oil’s first priority is to maximize profits. We can’t let them use Putin’s invasion as an excuse to pad their bottom line with war-fuelled profits.”
Back home, Ed Miliband, the man responsible for the price cap on energy bills that doesn’t really work, says the case for a windfall tax is “unanswerable”.
Well, the answer is that we need BP and the rest to invest those profits in making sure we have some certainty of energy supply at a cost we can afford. That’s a big job and it just got a lot harder.
There’s a tendency for some in Labour to see any profit as a failure of taxation policy. How could that money have sneaked away from the government, where it rightly belongs?
BP, Shell and the rest are hard to love. But within the confines of whatever we agree environmentally, they are probably the best routes out of our energy crisis.
Handicapping them now might feel good. In the longer run, it probably hurts everyone.
