Shell has posted the highest profits ever recorded by a British company. The reports I've read have branded this "obscene" and "absolutely scandalous". How so? The price of a barrel of oil is at record levels due to increasing demand and problems with supply. Of course profits will be high. The main thrust of the articles appears to be that if the oil companies made less profit or the exchequer collected less tax the price of petrol at the pump would be cheaper. If anything petrol is not expensive enough; we already fail to pay the price of the environmental damage caused by our addiction to oil at the point of purchase so reducing the price of the drug to which our society is addicted is not likely to help matters. A spokesman for the AA said:

"The oil companies need to reinvest this profit back into securing future supplies, and hopefully pushing prices down. They need to explore new oil fields and build more refineries so that there is no shortage in world supply. The key measure is whether, when the world oil price comes down again, petrol prices come down as fast as they went up when the oil price went up."

Clearly this person doesn't grasp the concept of peak oil or that the price of a barrel of oil is not going down for the forseeable future. We're depleting the easy-to-pump stuff and the rest will require billions to extract, at a time when demand from China and India is growing. The ignorance of these issues is staggering. The oil companies aren't going to make a huge noise about it and government sure as hell isn't so you're going to have to read up on it yourselves.