Sen. Sheldon Whitehouse (D-RI) wants to know why ExxonMobil, the American transnational oil and gas giant, appears to pay more in taxes to Saudi Arabia than it does to the United States government. Especially in light of reports that the U.S. is the largest source for Exxon’s oil and gas production, providing more than 30% of each for the company.
Whitehouse shared an excerpt from an Inside Climate News article that says Exxon produces more energy from U.S. than elsewhere, while paying the U.S. federal government less in taxes than it paid at least five other nations.
“Think we’re getting screwed by Big Oil?” Whitehouse asked rhetorically in his caption.
The article, which uses SEC data to report oil industry payments to governments around the world, relays that Exxon paid $32 billion to 28 countries where it extracted fossil fuels last year, including $5.6 billion to Saudi Arabia.
Think we’re getting screwed by Big Oil? Check this out:https://t.co/IFHe2zyuNj pic.twitter.com/JFglkzSpIg
— Sheldon Whitehouse (@SenWhitehouse) October 22, 2024
Getting in front of the information, ExxonMobil warned that the data it supplied could be misinterpreted, asserting in its Specialized Disclosure Report that “the narrow focus of this report makes it challenging to draw meaningful comparisons of payments across countries.” (That narrow focus required reporting on payments to the federal government, the company says, not state and local entities.)
The Exxon statement claimed it paid more than $10 billion in the U.S., almost twice what Saudi Arabia received. The company claimed that the different ways payments are structured, their timing, and the variability of entities which receive the funds make comparisons between countries hard to gauge.
“Disclosures do not require companies to report payments to state and local governments,” Exxon stated.
Republican presidential candidate Donald Trump — fond of saying “drill baby drill” — favors, along with most of the GOP, more extraction permissions on U.S. land for oil concerns like ExxonMobil, ostensibly in the name of “energy independence.” (NOTE: Chemical engineer Robert Rapier argued in Newsweek in 2023 that “U.S. Energy Independence” had soared to its “Highest Level In Over 70 Years.”)
In 2017, one of Trump’s first acts in office was to sign a bill repealing the rule that required the disclosures eventually contained in the new report cited by Whitehouse. At the time, former ExxonMobil CEO Rex Tillerson was Trump’s Secretary of State.
Whitehouse’s unrelenting criticism of Big Oil asserts that the industry’s practices make America less safe, not more, due to what he characterizes as a combination of pernicious business practices, the spreading of misleading information, and fossil fuel’s deleterious impact on climate.
When Big Oil showed record profits last year during a time when the industry’s climate change commitments were being questioned and global economies were suffering major inflation that produced consumer pain, Vicki Hollub, CEO of U.S. oil and gas producer Occidental Petroleum told CNBC: “The biggest challenge that is harder to address than even the innovation around technology is just getting people to trust our industry again and to understand what the data really says.” That challenge persists.