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Big Oil Continues to Announce Record Profits While Consumers Suffer at the Pump

July 31, 2008
Blog

As consumers' struggle to pay record prices at the pump, Big Oil is set once again to report another quarter of record profits.

B-P was the first oil company to announce its second quarter profits for the year. Earlier this week, B-P announced that its profits soared to $9.47 billion over the last four months----that's a 28 percent increase over the same quarter last year.

While B-P is reporting these higher than expected profits, it is unlikely that it will invest much of that money into either oil production or investing in renewable technologies.

Instead, like its other friends in Big Oil, B-P will once again repurchase stock. Last year, the company spent $7.5 billion repurchasing its stock---more than 13 times what it spent on investments in renewable energy.

B-P and Big Oil have been setting profit records thanks to an energy policy that was written in secret in 2001 by Vice President Cheney. House Democrats are taking our nation's energy policy in a new direction, one where the consumer, not Big Oil, is the priority.