Unprecedented Profits

NEW YORK (Reuters) – Exxon Mobil Corp. (XOM.N: Quote, Profile,
Research), the world’s largest publicly traded oil company, reported
a quarterly profit of $10.7 billion on Monday, rounding out the most
profitable year in U.S. corporate history.

The results pushed up Exxon’s profit for the year to a staggering $36.13
billion — bigger than the economies of 125 of the 184 countries ranked
by the World Bank. Profit rose 42 percent from 2004, largely due to soaring
oil and gas prices.

from Reuters

WASHINGTON — President Bush said yesterday he would
use his annual address to Congress tomorrow to call for more use of alternative
energy
sources. The president also plans to put forward initiatives on issues
such as healthcare and taxes, analysts said.

”We have got to wean ourselves off hydrocarbons, oil. . . . We have
got a serious problem, and now is the time to fix it, and I’m going
to address
it again at the State of the Union," said Bush, a former Texas oilman
who has worked closely with the oil and gas industry for years.

From the Boston Globe

Unprecedented! Raking in historical, as in the history
of the planet historical, capital profits, and the far-seeing Energy
Industry is already laying the
groundwork for the "Next Big Thing". Why else would they be having their
shameless shills in the White House talk about the end of the Hydrocarbon
Age.

Expect isolated ingenious lip-service and proto-projects
on "green" technologies like cars that run on trash or corn, but this
will just be window dressing
designed to maybe make our oil reserves last a little longer and develop
stopgap technologies in preparation for an increasingly likely interruption
of our
foreign oil supplies at some point during the next 10-15 tumultuous years.

Expect a well choreographed yet appearantly event-driven
spiraling up of oil prices. Each natural disaster, blown up refinery,
political
tiff with
a producing government, local civil war and US military intervention will
lead to an inexorable increase of oil prices. This, in turn, will allow
the escalating squeeze of the world’s capital flow to those who own and
distribute the diminishing supply.  Of course, it will all be strictly
in accord with the holy law of supply and
demand.

Finally, when oil gets to about $250 a barrel and
gas hits seven or eight bucks a gallon, people will start panicking and
the government will
be ready
to throw big money at – guess who – to bring alternative energy production
on-line asap. Expect the Energy Industry to be ready to serve, with
some high-tech, centralized and billable distribution plan for something
expensive like "Atomic Energy 2.0" or space-based solar.

There will probably be a transition period when Americans still use dwindling
and increasingly expensive gasoline for their cars but heating and electrical
production shift over to non-hydrocarbon
sources. America’s love affair with cars will insure that they will be the
last vestiges of the hydrocarbon age to go.

But go they will. The age of hydrocarbons is coming to an end,
and the Lords of Oil are not going down without a fight, but rather plotting
to insure that they also direct the next phase of our energy evolution.

What and when that will be is still anybody’s guess. Does it matter that
the Oil Lords are accumulating more money than has ever been collected by
one group in human history? Does it matter what they are going to do with
that money? Does it matter what energy source replaces hydrocarbons as
they start to run out and get prohibitively expensive?

The feeling here is that if anything matters, this does.