Big Oil And Energy Independence

Floor Speech

BIG OIL AND ENERGY INDEPENDENCE -- (House of Representatives - February 08, 2007)

Ms. KAPTUR. Madam Speaker, I imagine that I am not the only Member who hears from constituents regularly when oil companies report record profits, particularly with gas prices being what they have been over the past year.

Last Friday, the New York Times had this headline: World's Largest Oil Companies Gushing Profits. The Times story followed a report that ExxonMobil, the world's largest publicly traded company, had enjoyed the largest annual profit for any company in history, almost $40 billion in 1 year, at a time when extraordinarily high gasoline prices were punishing the budgets of almost every family in our country and punishing the budgets of every business in our country.

Did ExxonMobil lower the prices at the pump to adjust for these egregious profits? Absolutely not. In its first order of business, it spent almost $10 billion to buy back its own stock, and then it took some of its profits to create a disinformation campaign against the panel on climate change.

And, finally, this week what did ExxonMobil do? It went after the State of Alabama, and lawyers for the company asked the Alabama Supreme Court to overturn a $3.5 billion punitive damage award that was made by a jury 3 years ago when it found that Exxon had defrauded the State of royalties for natural gas production in Mobile Bay. Actually, the original fine had been $11.9 billion.

You know, it must be hard being a giant oil company these days. It must be hard work making so much money you don't know how to spend it. That is not a problem most American families can relate to, but that is the problem that the giant oil companies face today.

The New York Times article reported that the world's 10 biggest oil companies made more than $100 billion in profit in 2004, more than the gross domestic product of all of Malaysia, and their sales were more than $1 trillion more than the gross domestic product of Canada.

The Associated Press reported earnings of ExxonMobil, ChevronTexaco, ConocoPhillips, BP, Royal Dutch/Shell, their earnings exceeded $142 billion, enough to buy every person in the United States 175 gallons of midgrade gasoline. Those combined profits, said the AP, surpassed the gross domestic product of Iraq and more than 160 other nations.

Keep in mind, 6 years ago before President Bush was placed in office, crude oil futures were trading below $15 a barrel, one-fourth less than today. The price of oil when President Bush was placed in office was $23.19 a barrel; last month, it was $52.25 a barrel. The dollar value of imports to the United States for the first 11 months of 2001, President Bush's first year in office, was $69.9 billion, but last year it was up 187 percent to $201.2 billion. When will we learn the true cost of our dependence on foreign oil?

It is no surprise that the world's largest oil reserves are located in the Middle East: Saudi Arabia, Iran, Iraq, Kuwait, the United Arab Emirates. And the hot new area, of course, for exploration is Africa; and I imagine that may be a reason President Bush this week announced a new U.S.-Africa Command.

Not to take a back seat, the Peoples Republic of China has offered more than $5 billion in grants and loans in Africa, not out of the goodness of its heart, because we saw the compassion of the Chinese Government in Tiananmen Square, but China is interested in Africa's natural resources, including oil. And now the Bush administration is trying to play catch-up.

A cynic would say you could look at that list of nations and probably discern where the next war will break out, but that would be tantamount to saying that the Bush administration started a war with Iraq over oil, and we all know that cannot possibly be true.

But it is not hard to make the case between record high gasoline prices, record high oil company profits, and record high U.S. trade deficits.

The American people understand the connection. They live the connection every day, and they expect this Congress to do something about it. Not 25 years from now, not 20 or 15 years from now, but this year, to move our Nation toward energy independence with dispatch.

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