Oil companies can be pretty slick

You may not have heard. The mainstream media isn’t paying a lot of attention to this situation, so I thought I’d point it out as a public service. Gas prices are getting a tad high. According to a Department of Energy website the national average for a gallon of gasoline on July 7th was $4.11.
The line graph on that webpage resembles a mountain range. There have been some real ups and downs over the last two and half years. Unfortunately, the graph point representing the current price is a Mt. Everest, 29,035 feet above sea level, peak, not a Mt. Sunflower, 4,039 feet above sea level, the highest point in Kansas, peak (I can be educational while depressing everyone).
Of course when things like this happen everyone wants to point fingers. The price of gas is going up and up because the oil producing countries are gouging us. If somebody on eBay has a Beanie Baby collection that the United States, most of China, the entire European Union and a great deal of India wants he is not listing it for twenty bucks. Supply and demand is the simplest law of economics. Even the guy left staring at a warehouse full of “Giuliani for President” bumper stickers understands supply and demand, at least he does now.
Maybe it isn’t the fault of the big oil producing nations. Maybe it is the fault of big oil companies. Naaah, it couldn’t be their fault. Those guys are barely making ends meet as they struggle to pay the oil prices and at the same time do all that scientific research into alternative energy resources, renewable ones, which are plentiful right here in the good ol’ U.S. of A.
I have just been handed this piece of information. Three of the top five companies in the United States, as far as pure income generated, are oil companies. Wait that’s income. It doesn’t mean their making any profit. What? Exxon made a profit of 40.6 billion dollars last year. Which is enough money to purchase 9,878,345,498 gallons of gas at the local pump. That ought to get the family truckster to Disney World and back a few times. Try 68,126,520 times to be exact. This means the entire population of Hutchinson could, individually, drive to Orlando and back once a month for the next 138 years. (As an educator I must point out to all young people reading this that math skills come in handy no matter what your profession, even newspaper columnist. Stay in school.)
Fortune Magazine, the home to all things obscenely rich, lists the top five revenue earning companies, in order, as: Wal-Mart, Exxon Mobil, Chevron, General Motors, and Conoco Phillips. Wal-Mart makes its money often trading on the hardship of others, but we are not bashing them at the moment. General Motors brought in a ton of money but they were able to lose much more than they made for a negative profit margin. That leaves the three oil companies.
Exxon made more money in profit than all but fifty-seven of the Fortune 500 made period. Their profit was 11% of their income. Yet we are not supposed to vilify them for making any money off this increase in gas prices. That is like saying the Joker is not to blame for using the money from his bank robberies to buy a mansion, a swimming pool, a private jet, a condo on a remote tropical island, heck, the whole tropical island, like the C.E.O.’s of oil companies do. Rex Tillerson, the C.E.O. of Exxon Mobil has a compensation package (you and I get paychecks, these guys get compensation packages) of $13 million a year. That is (more math girls and boys) $35,616 dollars every day of the year, even Christmas and John D. Rockefeller’s birthday.
T. Boone Pickens announced he wants to put money towards utilizing wind power. He says we ought to exploit the “wind corridor” stretching from the Canadian border to west Texas. Think about it. Instead of dealing with Hugo Chavez and Mahmoud Ahmadinejad we have to deal with farmer guys from North Dakota. Talk about a no-brainer.
My solution will utilize wind power and find a use for politicians. Place wind turbines around Denver from August 25th through the 28th and Minneapolis from September 1st through the 4th. All the hot air being blown at the political conventions would create enough energy to power electric cars for each citizen of Hutchinson to go to Orlando and back once a month for 139 years.