$36 Billion gouge - Exxon 2005

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Originally posted by quelar:
[b]Please, stop talking about the environmental distruction, the paying off of government officials to keep Global Warming quiet, the strong arming of local governments into bad deals, pushing for wars to get new pipelines through central asia, death squads taking out local leaders who oppose drilling, and all the rest.
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Hey, a death-squad job is a job and those bastards cost us more than the private security contractors in Iraq. Not to mention the payoffs to local tribal leaders, mid and senior-level government officials, election campaigns and the like. All that money goes right back into the local economy.

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U.S. Democrats, who now control Congress, slammed the record profits as "outlandish," and vowed to raise taxes against Exxon and other oil companies in order to fund alternative fuels and technologies to increase energy efficiency.
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In a full-page ad that ran in The New York Times and other major U.S. newspapers yesterday, Exxon said that it reinvests its profits to supply growing energy demand, which it said will climb by 40 per cent by 2030.

Exxon wasn't alone in unprecedented oil earnings. Royal Dutch Shell PLC, an Anglo-Dutch company, and U.S.-run Marathon Oil and Valero Energy, also posted best-ever annual results yesterday. And ConocoPhillips Co., also American, last week posted its highest profits. Profits at the five companies together totalled $91.1-billion -- in a year when drivers paid record prices for gasoline.
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Both Democratic and Republican members of Congress have also urged Exxon to end its funding of organizations that deny the existence of -- or minimize the seriousness of -- human-made global warming.

Scientists yesterday accused the conservative American Enterprise Institute, which receives funding from Exxon, of offering scientists up to $10,000 for articles that undercut a report to be released today from the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change, a group of the world's leading scientists who say global warming is human-made and blame it largely on the burning of oil and other fossil fuels.

As a result, they predict more frequent heat waves, droughts and rain storms, as well as more violent typhoons and hurricanes.

The Enterprise Institute, which has received more than $1.6-million, sent letters to scientists, offering to pay for essays that "thoughtfully explore the limitations of climate model outputs," the Guardian news service reported.

Last month, the Union of Concerned Scientists, an environmental lobby group, said that Exxon has spent $16-million over the past 10 years financing organizations that deny the seriousness of climate change.

Alden Meyer, a strategist with the group, compared Exxon's efforts to discredit the science of global warming to the tobacco companies' efforts to sow doubts about the link between smoking and lung cancer in order to protect their profits.

The oil giant has recently acknowledged that human-made global warming is a threat, but continues to resist government action that would impose limits or new costs on oil consumption.

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