With crude at $100 a barrel, Big Oil needs no tax breaks

Beating up energy executives is no policy, but at least end the giveaways.

Congress is rarely more indignant than when gasoline prices are high and a committee has managed to drag a group of Big Oil executives up to Capitol Hill. The sessions generally produce more heat than light, more blame-shifting than fact-finding, and so it was Tuesday at the House Select Committee on Energy Independence and Global Warming.

“On April Fool’s Day, the biggest joke of all is being played on American families by Big Oil,” declared Chairman Edward Markey, D-Mass., who along with several of his colleagues complained about sky-high prices and profits and the oil companies’ reluctance to spend a lot of money on alternative energy sources.


Beating up on oil company executives is about as effective as sending Vice President Cheney to Saudi Arabia to plead for more oil production. One passes for a Democratic energy policy, the other for a Republican policy. Neither makes the hard choices nor takes the long-term view needed to wean the nation from its destructive addiction to oil.

Roughing up oil executives does make for good political theater, of course, but blaming them for making money is like blaming dogs for chasing squirrels. Today’s price of oil is being set less by greed than by global uncertainty, weakening production, the sagging dollar and growing demand from China and India. Repeated federal investigations have failed to show oil company conspiracies to manipulate prices at the pump.

That being said, the industry’s critics are justified in taking aim at one fat target