Top executives of the world's five largest, oil companies—BP, Chevron, ConocoPhillips, ExxonMobil and Shell—will testify before the Senate Finance Committee Thursday about gas prices, profits and subsidies that many Democrats have vowed to ax. While the execs can expect to catch a lot of flak from Democrats and even some Republicans on the committee, Sen. Robert Menendez of New Jersey may be toughest of all. He is demanding an apology from the CEO of ConocoPhillips for a company press release headlined “ConocoPhillips Highlights Solid Results and Raises Concerns Over Un-American Tax Proposals at Annual Meeting of Shareholders:

“For ConocoPhillips to question the patriotism of those elected officials who believe that they do not deserve billions of dollars in wasteful subsidies is simply beyond the pale. I expect an apology from the CEO tomorrow at tomorrow’s hearing. It is simply not acceptable,” said Menendez, who is leading the charge to strip billions of dollars in tax incentives from the five largest oil companies.

Democrats are pushing proposals that would cut $21 billion from some (but not all) such subsidies from the five companies, whose total profit from 2001 through 2010 was $951 billion.

Smearing their opponents in the fight to keep up the flow of subsidies, some of which the oil companies have been rewarded with for decades, is not nearly as damaging as Big Oil's other shenanigans, however. And one of those may not even be raised at the hearings. It should be. The Natural Resources Defense Council has noted:

Big Oil companies and their allies in Congress want to block the crucial transition toward more fuel-efficient cars and cleaner sources of energy. In 2010, Big Oil spent over $146 million lobbying Congress They’re using the latest price hikes to convince us that we need more domestic drilling, and that stronger worker and environmental protections would drive prices even higher. But we know that’s not the case, and they’re putting profits ahead of Americans. The solution: new car technology, mass transit and alternative fuels that reduce our dependence on oil. We don't have to pay high gas prices if we end our extreme reliance on oil. And we can start with our cars. Raising average fuel efficiency of cars to 60 miles per gallon by 2025 would reduce gasoline consumption by 2.8 million barrels per day by 2030. Oil is a lousy way to power cars. Only two out of every ten gallons of gas in your tank actually moves your car – the rest is wasted or idled away. Sixty-two percent of fuel in your tank is wasted on the inherent inefficiency of the internal combustion engine. Another 17 percent is lost while the engine idles. Electric cars apply 75 percent of the energy stored in their batteries to actually moving the car. And we can produce electricity in the United States from clean and sustainable sources. A combined investment in more efficient cars and trucks, cleaner fuels, and more transportation options for Americans could cut our oil imports in half by 2030. Setting higher fuel-efficiency standards for heavy-duty trucks and retrofitting existing cars and trucks to be more efficient, with better tires, for example, reduces the need for oil. And an aggressive expansion of transit in cities and suburbs, coupled with measures such as smart traffic management and better neighborhood designs, could save us even more oil.

This is simple stuff. It's the sort of thing advocates have pushed more than three decades while the naysayers in the fossil-fuel industry and their captive Congresspeople have successfully maintained business as usual. That's what they and the Kochtopus hope to continue doing for years more to come. Democrats on the committee should pound them, not for the sake of the media attention it will garner (although that isn't a bad thing) but because the policies of denial that the oil giants and their pals espouse have us speeding toward a brick wall.

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At Daily Kos on this date in 2008: