A storm of greed.

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 government"! But he wasn't offering to pay windfall profit taxes to help the government--already strapped by war and tax cuts for the wealthy--in this mission of mercy.

No, I suspect that much of the $33 billion extracted from the pockets of drivers this fall will go to the usual items of conspicuous consumption favored by the $10-million-a-year-and-up demographic.

The interesting thing is that more and more of these feature extravagant wastage of energy--not just private jets and Hummer limos, but frigid indoor summertime temperatures. Last summer, an enterprising New Fork Times Style section reporter measured the temperature inside various Manhattan stores. Strangely, from a pure comfort perspective, the classier the joint, the colder it was-ranging from 68 in Bergdorf-Goodman up to 80 in Old Navy. "The more ritzy the establishment is trying to be," he concluded, "the colder the air conditioning is kept"--even if it discourages the casual shopper in T-shirt and shorts.

When voluntary discomfort becomes a sign of status, you burn up all the BTUs you can. Expect joules to start replacing jewels as a key marker of wealth.

So maybe this winter guys like Lee Raymond will be displaying their earnings with ungodly hot indoor temperatures. How hot could you make your house, even a 10,000-square-footer, on $26 million a year? It shouldn't be that hard to achieve blast furnace conditions. In fact, if you're a top oil company executive, you have earned the right, in more ways than one, to burn in your own personal hell.

Barbara Ehrenreich is a columnist for The Progressive. Her latest book is "Bait and Switch: The (Futile) Pursuit of the American Dream."