sierra club

From Progress Report:

Top executives from the Big 5 oil companies — ExxonMobil, BP, Shell, Chevron, and ConocoPhillips — flew into Washington, D.C. on their corporate jets to defend their industry at a U.S. Senate hearing yesterday. The Associated Press reports that “Motorists are paying nearly $4 for a gallon of gasoline as the oil industry reaps pretax profits that could hit $200 billion this year.” The oil industry is not only benefiting from spiking gas prices, but also from over $4 billion in taxpayer subsidies they receive every year. With those subsidies and loopholes, Exxon’s federal tax rate for the last three years was 17.6 percent, lower than what the average American pays. “Voters’ anger over high gas prices is directed squarely at the oil companies and the politicians who defend them,” according to a recent national survey by Greenberg Quinlan Rosner Research for the Center for American Progress Action Fund, the League of Conservation Voters and the Sierra Club. “Voters are furious with oil companies, according to our polling, and overwhelmingly support ending their subsidies.” Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid (D-NV) “wants to bring a bill to the floor next week” Wednesday to repeal tax breaks for the major oil companies, “to help ease the deficit by about $21 billion over 10 years.”

PROFITING FROM PAIN: “Given profits of $35 billion in just the first quarter alone, it is hard to find evidence that repealing these subsidies would cut domestic production or cause layoffs,” Sen. Max Baucus (D-MT), chair of the Senate Finance Committee, said yesterday. “After all, based on first-quarter profits, these tax breaks represent less than 2 percent of what these companies are on pace to make this year. Even without these tax breaks, these companies would clearly be highly profitable.” In his opening statement, Baucus argued that the most vulnerable in society shouldn’t have to suffer for the benefit of oil companies. “We should use this money to reduce our deficit instead of putting the burden on seniors and our children’s future. The oil executives were unmoved. “Do you think that your subsidy is more important than the financial aid that we give to students to go to college?” Sen. Chuck Schumer (D-NY) asked. ConocoPhillips CEO Jim Mulva said the question was “very difficult” to answer. “Not once during this hearing have I heard any semblance of a willingness to share unless every company also has to,” Rockefeller concluded. “I haven’t heard anybody talk about what they are doing — what they would be willing to do — to share in our budget problem. The total concept of what keeps America together…is a sense of fairness, that everybody has to lose at some point, everybody has to give something up to be a real country.” (more…)