Stand anywhere in the vicinity of a college campus, coffee shop or movie studio and you're bound to hear some invective thrown around at the oil industry. It's evil, it's wrong, the companies do bad things! Things of that nature. I'm not going to debate whether or not oil and gas production are evil, but that would be a fun topic for future discussion. No, the topic today is whether or not energy companies are "evil." Evil in this case being soaking consumers for a maximum amount of profits. I'll leave it up to you to decide if such a thing, if it is true, constitutes as being "evil" and not just as "something paying customers don't like." The blog Government Is Not Your Daddy cited some interesting statistics about how much money energy companies have to fork over to the government, and how little profit they actually make compared to other industries. Oil Profit Chart Naturally there was some arguments from detractors of this posting, with people whipping out the other costs associated with the industry, namely the "moral costs" of things like polluting the environment, lying about global warming and other things that would make Care Bears cry. That's another topic again, so for now, think about how much of a gallon of gasoline is going in Rex Tillerson's pocket and how much is going into the national treasury. –Stephen Payne, Editor, Oil and Gas Investor This Week; www.OilandGasInvestor.com; spayne@hartenergy.com