What’s it going to take to impose a tax on windfall oil profits?

With Exxon’s second-quarter earnings sloshing in at 11 billion, 680 million dollars, you’d maybe, just maybe expect Congress to impose a windfall profits tax on big oil.

It would be wise to then use that money to subsidize alternative clean energies.

But that’s not happening.

Quite the contrary.

ExxonMobil and other charter members of the oiligopoly are getting off scot-free on many leases that are on your public lands, even as they are demanding the right to drill off shore and in ANWR.

A law passed in Clinton’s day allowed oil companies that secured these leases in 1998 and 1998 to be exempt from royalties, regardless of the price of oil, as Tysom Slocum, director of Public Citizen’s Energy Program points out.

http://www.citizen.org/pressroom/release.cfm?ID=2711

When that bill was signed, oil was trading at $18 a barrel, Slocum notes. Now it’s around $120 a barrel, and still ExxonMobil and friends will be able to produce royalty-free.

This ridiculous favor to the oil industry is going to cost U.S. taxpayers $60 billion over the term of these leases, Slocum estimates.

It may help shareholders of ExxonMobil.

But it sure won’t help the U.S. Treasury, and it won’t help us wean ourselves off oil.

Plus, it’s not like ExxonMobil and the other oil giants need this break to drill for oil.

They’re all making money hand over slimy fist.