A storm of greed.

• Author: Ehrenreich, Barbara
• Position: Flip Side - High prices of heating oil, greedy oil companies

After hurricanes comes the cold, and with heating oil prices leaping up 30 percent in the Northeast, you better have a winter survival strategy in place.

Put the toddlers to bed in double layers of bunny suits, with mittens attached.

Ramp up grandma's chondroitin sulfate dose and hope the fifty-degree nights don't inflame her arthritis.

Or invest in one of those new fireplaces that move heat into the room instead of sucking it up the chimney.

For fuel, you can always burn the Williams-Sonoma catalogs that have been arriving in bulk. I'm sure you weren't ordering $600 table settings for Christmas anyway.

I had, in my innocence, thought it was the hurricanes that were driving up energy prices. But no, it turns out, as usual, that the flip of misery is gluttony. The top five oil companies--ExxonMobil, Chevron, ConocoPhillips, BE and Royal Dutch/Shell--reported total earnings last quarter of nearly $33 billion. According to Senator Barbara Boxer's website, the average pay of energy company CEOs has soared by 215 percent since 2002. Lee Raymond, CEO of ExxonMobil, will be raking in $26 million in salary, bonus, and stock gains. Forget hurricanes, this is a greed-storm.

What are they going to do with all the money? There are things they could have done, and still might do, that would have been brilliant PR for petro-capitalism. They could donate a chunk of that $33 billion to the victims of Katrina and Rita, for example. Or, as Senators Charles Schumer, Democrat of New York, and Tom Harkin, Democrat of Iowa, are urging, they could start helping to pay this winter's school heating bills. It's hard to hold a pencil when your hand is frozen into a claw shape.

Or the oil companies could reach into their pockets to help people with fixed incomes, low incomes, and no incomes stay warm this winter. Not that the oil executives are totally unaware of the problem. When CNN's Soledad O'Brien posed it to one such executive, he kindly suggested that it was "the responsibility of government" to help the needy. And we thought all those CEOs hated "big...