Fossils then and
now
Oil company profits
explode
By
Deirdre Griswold
When
you get your fuel oil bill this winter, or tank up your car, don't faint and
don't get mad at OPEC. Save your energy for fighting the oil
monopolies.
They're
the ones raking in the profits from higher oil prices. Take Royal Dutch/shell,
for example, Europe's biggest petroleum company. It just reported its
third-quarter operating profits. Ready for this? Earnings jumped by 80 percent
above the same quarter last
year.
The
company sucked up $3.25 billion in profit in only three months. That kind of
money, according to a United Nations report last spring, could provide clean
water, basic health care and education to the hundreds of millions of people
around the world in direst poverty. And that's just one oil
company.
The
wealth that higher oil prices have put in the hands of the world's seven largest
oil companies, most of which are based here in the United States, is phenomenal.
In addition to ending the poverty crisis in the world, it could be used to
finance research into alternative forms of energy, since oil is polluting the
world and will run out some day. It could also be put into building good mass
transit systems to reduce the congestion, delays and pollution of heavy
automobile
traffic.
Instead,
we can expect to get more self-serving advertising from the oil giants, more
politicians bought by oil money, more gas-guzzling vehicles, and more control
over social life by this small clique of
billionaires.
If
anything should belong to the people, it is oil. It is a "fossil fuel" because
it comes from the decay of organisms that lived millions of years ago. Today,
however, it is the billionaires controlling it that are the real
fossils.
This article is copyright under a Creative Commons License.
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