Reuters: Shares of Exxon-Mobil have jumped to an all-time high on word that the company posted a quarterly profit of more than $10 billion (a 36 percent jump), thanks largely to high oil prices. Tyson Slocum, Public Citizen’s energy guy, told the Institute for Public Accuracy: “We’re getting so little bang for our buck. In Europe, they do pay more for gas, but much of it is made up of taxes that subsidize mass transit, so they’re getting something very tangible for their money. We don’t get anything like that for the prices we’re paying. We need to tax these windfall profits that companies like Exxon are posting and make investments into getting off our oil addiction.”
Expect Exxon, rather, to spend some of this bounty on its strenuous PR effort to deny the reality of global warming, as documented by Chris Mooney in Mother Jones.
(And see here for an interactive chart of 40 Exxon-funded public policy groups that seek to undermine the scientific consensus that humans are causing the earth to overheat.)