You Paid for BP's Best Quarter in Years
BP didn’t do anything particularly impressive this quarter. They didn’t drill more, find more, or sell more – in fact, they’re actually pumping less oil than before.
They just kept the lights on while a war in the Middle East did the work for them, and somehow walked away with $3.2 billion, more than double what they made this time last year. The company calls this “exceptional oil trading performance.” Exceptional.
For context, $3.2 billion is roughly the GDP of a small island nation. It’s more money than most people will interact with in several lifetimes. It landed in BP’s quarterly earnings because a war made oil expensive, not because anyone at the company did anything particularly clever. So we started thinking about what else you could do with it — because the list turns out to be pretty long.
You could, for starters, fund the entire National Park Service for almost a year. You could cover free school lunches for every kid in the country for a couple of months. You could cancel the student debt of tens of thousands of people before that lunch.
Or you could do something the federal government currently refuses to... like actually protect people from the disasters that are already happening. The U.S. experienced 23 billion-dollar weather disasters in 2025 alone — floods, wildfires, hurricanes — and FEMA’s entire budget for helping states prepare for the next round runs about $1 billion. That number was already stretched thin. BP made three times that in a single quarter, by producing less oil than the year before.
That gap shows up everywhere at the state level. New Jersey is trying to protect low-lying coastal communities in places like Hoboken and Atlantic City from rising seas. Virginia’s Hampton Roads, the second most vulnerable region in the country to sea-level rise after New Orleans, has a $2.6 billion coastal storm protection project with no clear long-term funding plan. Maine, Connecticut, Massachusetts, California — every state has a list of projects ready to go, infrastructure that needs hardening, communities that need protecting, and a funding gap where the money should be.
States are underwater and so are a lot of the people living in them. Analysis of the windfall profits tax proposed after 2022 found it would have sent $1,715 to every American household. It might not sound like a lot, but for more than half of Americans who can’t cover a $1,000 emergency, $1,715 is the difference between handling a crisis and being swallowed by one.
And then there’s the fact that while states are scraping for coastal protection money and FEMA is stretching a billion dollars across dozens of disasters, the Trump administration cut a separate check — nearly $1 billion in taxpayer money — to TotalEnergies, a French fossil fuel company, to cancel two offshore wind projects that would have put 37,000 Americans to work and powered 1.3 million homes. So while Hampton Roads waits on flood protection funding and FEMA stretches a billion dollars across 23 disasters, the administration found money pretty fast when the goal was killing clean energy.
Funny how that works. When the goal is keeping fossil fuels on top, a billion dollars is apparently easy to find, and when a war hands BP another $3.2 billion they didn’t earn, that money flows just as freely to shareholders and executives while everybody else waits. Senator Whitehouse and Rep. Khanna have a bill that would change the direction of that flow, taking a slice of these war windfalls and returning them to the public that paid them at the pump — to the FEMA budgets that can’t keep pace with the disasters already hitting, to the coastal plans that have been designed and ready for years, and to every state sitting on a list of projects with a funding gap where the money should be.
Four out of five Americans support a windfall profits tax, which means this isn’t a particularly controversial idea so much as an obvious one that keeps not happening. The money BP made this quarter doing nothing new could cover a lot of what this country keeps saying it can’t afford — and Congress has a bill in front of them right now that would start changing that. Tell them to pass it.