29 September 21
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Yes, you read that right. The U.S. gives the fossil fuel industry a special deduction to help make the planet hotter.
Unlike when they were first created, these giveaways no longer create jobs. Instead, they pad the profits of a malign industry. A recent study found that 96% of federal fossil fuel subsidies increase profits for oil and gas companies over and above the investment hurdles needed to begin new projects.
Even more dismaying, this is an industry that has spent the past four decades carefully researching the human impacts of climate change, while publicly denying its existence or that it is a problem, and continuing to spew planet-altering greenhouse gases into the atmosphere.
Why are we rewarding them with taxpayer money for this behavior?
On Earth Day this year, a senior official from a fossil fuel industry trade group claimed, under oath at a congressional hearing, that “if you want to take the entire tax code and treat the oil and gas industry as every other industry, we’re happy to do that.”
We should be taking him up on this offer.
President Biden called for eliminating “billions of dollars in subsidies, loopholes, and special foreign tax credits for the fossil fuel industry” as a key policy to help pay for his American Jobs Plan. However, the current version of the Build Back Better Act moving through the House is missing most of the domestic fossil fuel subsidies repeal passed by the Senate Finance Committee earlier this year.
The reason?
Despite its platitudes that it is “certainly fine being treated like every other industry,” the very same trade group has been out in full force lobbying against eliminating its lucrative subsidies. Recycling old strategies for influencing the climate debate, the American Petroleum Institute and groups like the U.S. Chamber of Commerce, and the American Exploration and Production Council have been running a coordinated and expensive campaign of mass corporate influence.
Over the past several weeks, the fossil fuel industry wrote letters to congressional leaders and lobbied our House and Senate colleagues directly. It placed op-eds in the local newspapers of key oil and gas states like Pennsylvania, West Virginia and Oklahoma, as well as national outlets like the Hill and the Washington Examiner.
Most insidiously, through a faux grassroots group called “Energy Citizens,” the American Petroleum Institute spent millions of dollars running television and Facebook advertisements in key swing states and congressional districts with fearmongering messages.
Meanwhile, California and other states are suffering from out-of-control wildfires and their noxious smoke, tens of thousands of Louisianans were left without power for over two weeks after Hurricane Ida, and the 17th tropical storm of the season earlier this month in the Atlantic, an unusually high number for this time of year.
The fossil fuel industry is overwhelmingly responsible for the climate crisis. A 2017 report found that since 1988, active fossil fuel producers, including American companies ExxonMobil, Chevron, ConocoPhillips, Marathon Petroleum and Occidental Petroleum, are linked to 71% of all industrial greenhouse gas emissions.
At a time when even an international oil regulatory agency declared we must end all new oil and gas exploration today to have any hope of limiting devastating global warming, and when renewables are set to become a greater share of the U.S. energy mix than natural gas by 2050, we know that the only people arguing for padding the pockets of oil executives are the oil executives themselves.
Right now, Congress has the power to call the industry’s bluff. We can end special privileges for one of our most polluting and badly behaved industries and instead support the clean energy sources of the future. It’s time to reject bad-faith industry arguments intended to block climate legislation and preserve shareholder profits. Our colleagues in Congress need to summon the moral courage to fight for just that.
Pelosi said she still intends to stage the infrastructure vote on Thursday, but acknowledged her power as Speaker to delay it, if need be.
"We take it one step at a time," Pelosi told reporters after huddling with members of her caucus in the basement of the Capitol, referring to Thursday's vote.
She also repeated her intention to not bring legislation to the floor that does not have the votes for passage. Leaders of the Congressional Progressive Caucus say half the group is prepared to vote against the infrastructure bill unless the larger social spending bill moves in tandem.
Pelosi noted that, while the House Budget Committee has already approved a blueprint for the larger social spending bill - the second piece of Biden's legislative wishlist - the Senate moderates balking at the $3.5 trillion price tag have stalled progress on the broader two-pronged agenda.
"In the meantime, there was this 'Oh my god, we can't go to that number,'" Pelosi said, invoking the Senate holdouts. "Well that completely sets off the timetable."
Delaying that vote would be sure to infuriate the moderate Democrats who are fighting for immediate approval of the Senate-passed, bipartisan infrastructure bill - and won a promise from Pelosi to do it this week.
"We're voting Thursday," Rep. Josh Gottheimer (D-N.J.), a co-chair of the bipartisan Problem Solvers Caucus, said Tuesday.
An initial Monday vote on infrastructure was already kicked to Thursday when it became clear that there was no House-Senate agreement on the larger social benefits bill, which liberals are demanding before they'll support the infrastructure proposal. Without those assurances, it appears the liberals have the numbers to kill it.
Pelosi said Wednesday that she won't move one bill without the other.
"We're doing it simultaneously," she said.
And upping the stakes in the ongoing debate, she declared that a simple promise from the Senate centrists to support the larger "family" package won't be enough to spur the House to act. Instead, she wants legislative text to be drafted on that broader piece of Biden's agenda.
"We come to a place where we have agreement in legislative language - not just principle, in legislative language - that the president supports," she said. "It has to be his standard."
The prolonged impasse arrives at a delicate political moment when Biden's approval numbers are falling, and Democrats are also scrambling to prevent a government shutdown this week and a Treasury default next month, all in the face of entrenched GOP opposition.
Biden is racing to break the logjam, huddling Tuesday with the two centrist holdouts, Sens. Joe Manchin (D-W.Va.) and Kyrsten Sinema (D-Ariz.), in an escalating effort to win their support.
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