Record profits. When is a good time to talk about yet another consecutive quarter of record oil-company profits? So nosebleed rich are these guys that analysts were bummed when ExxonMobil revealed a first-quarter 2008 net income of only $10.9 billion, a mere 17 percent increase in quarterly profit from last year's record, versus the 25 percent Shell was reporting or BP's 63 percent rise. Stock in ExxonMobil, the world's biggest refiner, fell. The company, which pumps more oil from the ground than every OPEC member nation except Saudi Arabia and Iran, promised to do better.
What emergency? Its table set with a steady diet of confusing factoids and freshly mongered fear, the public is the patsy in a game of 73-card Monte and is being asked to swallow dubious environmental positions and geopolitical solutions. Food shortages may or may not be functions of high oil prices, but this humanitarian "crisis" is proof, we are told, of the urgent need to adopt the industry agenda whole: lose biofuels, weaken or eliminate environmental regulations, and resist all nationalized oil movements. Maintain major U.S. military presence in the Middle East, despite huge cost in men, money, and, er, oil. Cut taxes, let profits accrue. More drilling, offshore and in protected wilderness. Anything less is an affront to the world's poor.
Huh? Rest assured, whenever multinational corporations tell you that the questionable activity in which they are engaged must be done because the lives of those in the developing world depend on it, you've been lied to. When oil companies decry the rise of biofuels and tearfully relate how cropland that might otherwise go to feeding the poor will instead be devoted to powering someone's car, ask yourself, what world would that be? The one in a parallel universe where everything is the same, except oil companies look after the poor and want to make less money?
Call me when you get there.