Oil company profits have never been better. Stock prices are up. Shareholders are pocketing ever-bigger dividends. By nearly any measure, the petroleum industry is in its heyday.

But public opinion could hardly be worse.

Motorists paying more than $3 a gallon for gasoline have no shortage of names to castigate oil companies and their executives: Greedy. Un-American. The new robber barons.

Yesterday, Sen. John McCain, R-Ariz., invoked the harshest image yet: "I think they have the least PR sensitivity of any group outside of satanic cults."

McCain and his Senate colleagues yesterday asked the Internal Revenue Service to hand over the tax returns of the 15 largest oil and gas companies, saying they were concerned about excessive profits and outsized executive pay.

The news got even better — or worse — for the industry yesterday with the calculation that the country's three largest oil and gas companies are expected to report combined first-quarter earnings of more than $16 billion, a 24 percent increase over last year.

Instead of celebrating, oil companies are battling calls for a windfall profits tax, President Bush's call for an investigation into allegations of price-gouging and mounting consumer anger.

Oil executives have launched their own offensive to win American hearts and minds. In full-page advertisements and interviews, they argue that the millions of Americans who own shares in oil concerns are winners, too. Oil giant Exxon Mobil, the world's biggest company, with $1 billion a day in sales, insisted that it was too small to influence world oil markets.

"As big as we are, we are only 3 percent of the crude oil production in the world," said spokesman Mark Boudreaux.

Oil companies are reaping larger profits because the price they get for each barrel of crude oil they sell is rising much faster than the cost to extract it. In refining, profit margins are rising because the wholesale and retail prices for gasoline and diesel are far outpacing the added cost of more expensive oil they buy to process.

Oil companies can take solace in the fact that dozens of price-fixing investigations into their industry have come to naught.