“Windfall Profits”? You lost me there. The Dirty Secret is that the left has managed to indoctrinate the people that are too ingnorant or too lazy to find out the truth. What about the years that 90% of Oil Companies were wiped out because of overproduction (the Saudis opened the spigots up to control oil, which they did). Those companies never came back, and it took incredible ingenuity to prefect fracking to let the production rise again. Look at Oil Companies like farms. When the crops are plentiful, the price goes down. When they are scarce, the prices go up. Weather and politics controls everything. Simple enough? The government always sees the increased profits (which are put back into the ground for the most part with new exploration) as some kind of low hanging fruit. They can convince the great unwashed public that they are suffering because of that “bad man” oil company. I have been in the business for over 40 years and am getting tired of the crap. pick on microsoft for a change.
Hey! It's not like MSFT has earned it, or anything. /sarc, in case that's needed
In my 42 years in the oil industry we had maybe 18 that you could consider good ones. The rest were some form of fighting to survive or rebuild and most did not survive. They may have come back when things got better but they did not work in the oil industry until then. The survivors worked harder than ever before because of reduced staff and so they might not be one of the next let go.
The refinery coast is an interesting area to observe though. They mostly weather any storm. Steady base hits for them lead to long term prosperity. The upstream side of things not so much. The good times in upstream keep up with inflation for the most part and are a reversion to the mean.
If people want to pick on some industry pick on social media who produce nothing of substance, can be totally eliminated without any impact on society at all and make massively obscene profits with little investment at all. Go for financial services, software apps, medicine, pharmaceuticals or any of a number of similar businesses if the sheeple want a boogie man to go after.