To get this windfall, the oil companies didn't have to conspire with the Bush administration to start a war in Iraq. They didn't have to conspire among themselves to raise prices at the pump. If you own oil anywhere in the world, you didn't have to do a damned thing. Just close your eyes, make a wish, open them, and - surprise - you're getting an extra $25 a barrel.

Two years ago the online magazine Slate (a sister Washington Post publication) published a Michael Kinsley piece about taxing oil companies that touched on the subject. Kinsley noted that oil wells that could be profitably operated at $46 a barrel (the price a year before his column) could be even more profitably operated at $70 a barrel. Kinsley wrote:

I'm often asked this question: How did Big Oil conspire to get its big profits? The idea that a company like Exxon Mobil could earn $11.7 billion in a single quarter boggles the mind, even if you know what a far-flung empire it is.

Naturally, those same wells can be tapped more profitably still at $120 or more a barrel today.

Yesterday, in an effort to get a little more historical perspective, I called Jay Hakes, who was head of the Energy Department's Energy Information Administration from 1993 to 2000 and who is currently head of the Jimmy Carter Presidential Library and Museum in Atlanta. He witnessed the tussle in the late 1970s over the profits of the giant oil companies, including the passage of the windfall profits tax. At the time, President Carter had twinned the windfall profits tax with the lifting of price controls that had been in place for years on much of U.S. oil and gas. Some news organizations rented helicopters to see whether the oil companies had rented tankers and had idled them just off the coast to withold supplies and drive up prices.

Hakes, who has just published a book titled "A Declaration of Energy Independence," said his view on Exxon Mobil's profits goes something like this: "My basic explanation is that most of the oil reserves in world are controlled by state-owned oil companies," he said. "It's the explicit policy of OPEC to keep supplies tight and prices high. And other countries like Russia agree. So Exxon becomes kind of a free rider to that problem."

As a result, he said he has a problem with both sides of the recent vociferous political debate over oil company profits and their connection to high oil prices. Recent ads, he says, sound "strangely familiar" to the ads taken out in magazines in the late 1970s. Hakes said, "The historical perspective is that the oil companies always blame the environmentalists. The environmentalists and consumer groups blame the oil companies. And no one points the finger where it belongs, which is OPEC."

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