America, Over Big Oil's Barrel

In April and May, House and Senate committees called industry executives on the carpet for hearings, and earlier this month Congress took another run at imposing a windfall profits tax on the five major US oil companies, which together made a record $36 billion in the first quarter of 2008.

But the windfall profits bill—which also included measures to rescind some $17 billion in industry tax breaks—died a swift death in the Senate, garnering 51 votes, but not enough to overcome a filibuster. (The president also vowed to veto it.) And the hearings themselves amounted to little more than political theater, allowing members of Congress to talk tough on behalf of their suffering constituents without demanding anything that would make the lineup of oil execs—from Exxon, BP, Chevron, ConocoPhillips, and Shell—break a sweat.

To repel public hostility and government action, meanwhile, the American Petroleum Institute, the main oil and gas lobbying group, has launched a multimillion dollar media blitz. The campaign, according to the Washington Post, is aimed at convincing "voters—who, in turn, will make the case to their members of Congress—that rising energy prices are not the producers' fault and that government efforts to punish the industry, especially with higher taxes, would only make pricing problems worse."

Oil companies are trying their best to promote the highly counterintuitive idea that what's good for Big Oil is good for America. As Peter Robertson, vice chairman of Chevron, told the Senate Judiciary Committee in May, "Americans need companies that can effectively compete for access to new resources. Punitive measures that weakened us in the face of international competition are the wrong measures."

In denying responsibility for high fuel prices, the oil execs also evoked the ultimate mantra of the free market. "The fundamental laws of supply and demand are at work," said Shell president John Hofmeister—meaning, there's less oil and more people want it so the price has to go up. The law of supply and demand, however, is not a natural, immutable law, like the laws of physics. It is simply a way of describing the relationship between buyers and sellers in the marketplace. That is, sellers of an in-demand product can charge higher prices for it, but they don't have to do so; they could choose, instead, to trim their own profits—or at least pay their fair share of taxes. Before the judiciary committee, ExxonMobil VP J. Stephen Simon insisted that "it's not our profitability in this business that is driving the higher prices that consumers pay." This despite the fact that ExxonMobil alone reported $10.9 billion in earnings for the first three months of the year, up 17 percent over 2007, while BP's profits rose 60 percent, Shell's 25 percent, ConocoPhillips's 17 percent, and Chevron's 10 percent.

In fact, there's plenty that could be done to ease the burden on consumers. A proposal from the Center for American Progress, to name just one, calculated that simply by closing several tax loopholes and collecting royalties it is due on oil and gas extracted from public lands, the government would have enough to fund a substantial fuel price "reliefbate" for low- and middle-income Americans. (The Center's plan doesn't even include a windfall profits tax, which, if instituted, could be used to exponentially increase the government's investment in renewable energy.)

Nonetheless, Big Oil seems to have had some success in framing the debate over who is responsible for high gas prices, advancing not only the laws of the marketplace, but the bogeyman of the big nationalized foreign oil companies. "Government-owned national oil companies dominate the top spots," Exxon's Simon told the judiciary committee. The argument, now popular on both sides of the aisle, is that state-owned outfits control most of the supply and have their comparatively puny American counterparts over a barrel. (Only California's Maxine Waters dared, at a House hearing, to suggest that the United States might try nationalizing its own oil industry.)

It's been Big Oil's long-standing contention that the rapacious state-owned Middle Eastern, African, Asian, and Latin American oil companies are responsible for the price gouging. But this is a dubious argument. The United States is currently the third largest oil supplier in the world, following Saudi Arabia and Russia, as well as the single largest consumer. Tyson Slocum, the director of Public Citizen's energy program, says that on any given day ExxonMobil alone produces as much petroleum as the kingdom of Kuwait. US oil companies, of course, all have a hand in exploitation within many of the very state enterprises they decry, through outright contracts, service contracts, production agreements, and joint ventures. Currently, ExxonMobil, Chevron, and Shell, among other oil companies, are zeroing in on service contracts that will open the way for them to begin producing oil in Iraq.