From the Center for American Progress
Enjoy these two short blurbs from the Center for American Progress...the first about Oil Company Profits and the second on how they spend some of those profits.
ECONOMY -- BIG OIL COMPANIES ANNOUNCE RECORD PROFITS: Last week, Royal Dutch Shell announced that profits for the company soared to $26.7 billion in 2007, a record-breaking figure for a European company. The next day, The New York Times reported that "Exxon Mobil's performance last year was a blowout." The oil giant revealed last Friday "that it beat its own record for the highest profits ever recorded by any company, with net income rising 3 percent to $40.6 billion." Exxon Mobil's sales exceeded the gross domestic product of 120 countries. From the beginning of President Bush's tenure in office, the combined profits of the big five oil companies have skyrocketed from just under $40 billion in 2001 to $120 billion in 2007. As Nobel laureate Joseph Stiglitz recently noted in Vanity Fair, "The soaring price of oil is clearly related to the Iraq war. The issue is not whether to blame the war for this but simply how much to blame it."
RADICAL RIGHT -- GLOBAL WARMING DENIER GROUP HOSTING CONFERENCE FUNDED BY BIG OIL: From March 2-4, right-wing climate change-denial group The Heartland Institute will host what it calls a "Climate Skeptics" Conference. Heartland President Joseph Blast boasted that his conference would feature climate change deniers: "This is their chance to speak out." The online poster for the conference declares, "Global Warming is not a crisis!" Heartland's environmental stance is completely out of the mainstream, as the debate over human contribution to global warming is long over. Even as some top conservative presidential candidates recently endorsed California's effort to reduce auto greenhouse gas emissions, Heartland ridiculed the idea, calling California and its allies "environmental extremists." Heartland's extreme anti-environmentalism no doubt originates from its supporters. Between 1998 and 2005, oil giant Exxon Mobil gave nearly $800,000 to Heartland. The organization's board of directors includes Thomas Walton, Director of Economic Policy at General Motors, and James L. Johnson, formerly senior economist for oil company Amoco Corporation. As RealClimate notes, "Normal scientific conferences have the goal of discussing ideas and data in order to advance scientific understanding. Not this one."