There’s a certain type of idiot who, when presented with news of multiple deaths in developing countries, sagely says: “Life is cheap.”
Well, not in Iran it isn’t. My back-of-the-envelope-app calculations indicate that every life lost in Iran is worth approximately $12.74m. Unfortunately, that isn’t the same as the value of those lives. It’s the profits made by oil companies in the three months of the war divided by the conservative estimate of 7,300 people killed across Iran and Lebanon since the strikes began on February 28.
An analysis by The Guardian and Global Witness found that eight listed oil producers — Aramco, BP, Shell, Equinor, TotalEnergies, Eni, Chevron and ExxonMobil — made almost $93bn in the three months to the end of June, and that the first full financial quarter after the US-Israel war on Iran triggered a surge in global oil prices to highs above $126 a barrel.
The figures are staggering. The Guardian’s data suggests that the eight oil companies made more than $700,000 of profit every minute over the spring quarter. Six large European oil companies made at least $22bn in first-quarter 2026 profits, estimated to be 43% higher than in the first quarter of 2025. “The companies have used the biggest disruption of fossil fuel supplies in the market’s history to almost double their combined profits from just under $50bn in the same period last year.”
And, as The Guardian puts it, “while their market valuations were swelling by about $600bn to above $3-trillion, temperatures built towards a run of deadly heatwaves, all made more likely and more severe by burning fossil fuels. Carbon emissions from the world’s biggest fossil fuel firms were directly linked to fatal spells of hot weather for the first time by scientific analysis published last September. It found the emissions from any one of the 14 biggest companies were each enough to cause more than 50 heatwaves that would otherwise have been virtually impossible.”
Yes, yes, I’m sure there are some oil company shills reading this who will want to argue this point to death. It’s just a pity that “argue to death” isn’t a figure of speech any more, but is what is literally happening with the oil lobbyist industry. As they obfuscate and create white noise, our planet is dying.
Somehow, though, many of us appear to have grown accustomed to planetary extinction as a fact of life. “One death is a tragedy; a million deaths is a statistic” is a quote commonly misattributed to Stalin. Perhaps we could rewrite that and say: profiting from the destruction caused by climate change is a statistic, but profiteering from 7,300 deaths is an unconscionable evil.
The cost on the balance sheet
War profiteering as a business plan is an old imperial device, though, so why should the new imperialism be any different? US multinational Halliburton — the world’s second-largest oil service company, responsible for most of the world’s fracking operations — made $39.5bn from federal contracts related to the 2003-2011 Iraq War, a war that resulted in an estimated 500,000 people killed.
According to an analysis by the Financial Times, the US spent at least $138bn on contracts, with the top 10 contractors securing business worth at least $72bn between them. So the current crop of vampires sucking the life out of our planet is in a fine tradition.
Even the president of the US, while unfazed by the misery and deaths for which he is responsible, is finding this level of profiteering a little perturbing. Or at least is pretending to. Multiple outlets report Donald Trump as saying: “They’re making too much money based on a shortage. I don’t like it … Chevron: too much money. ExxonMobil: too much money. They’re going to give some of that back to the public and they better cut the retail price, the consumer price.”
That was just before Chevron reported its highest quarterly profit yet, $12.2bn, a fivefold increase on the same period last year. ExxonMobil reported a profit of $14.5bn in the second quarter, double what it made in the same period a year ago. It’s worth noting that this is the company’s highest quarterly profit since Russia’s invasion of Ukraine in 2022.
One assumes that if you read the FM, you might not actually worship at the altar of mammon, but you will at least have a soft spot for capitalism. The astonishing oil company profiteering should give us pause, though. If you’re not one of the people dying because of climate change-induced extreme weather events, killing the planet can be an abstract concept. But if you think of the profit-per-dead-person numbers encoded into oil company balance sheets, it gets a whole lot more real.
