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subsidised carbon emissions...

Federal subsidies for the fossil fuel industry have more than doubled since 2017 to an estimated $34.8 billion each year, a new analysis from Oil Change International has found. The report’s authors say that amount could soar to hundreds of billions of dollars in the years to come if lawmakers fail to rein in subsidies for controversial carbon capture and hydrogen technologies.

 

Subsidies for Fossil Fuel Firms Have Doubled Since 2017, Now $35 Billion a Year
Oil and gas companies could gobble up billions in tax credits if lawmakers don’t act, warn the authors of a new report.
By Mike Ludwig , TRUTHOUT

 

As the Trump administration attempts to crush research on climate change and erase the intensifying global crisis from the headlines, the fossil fuel industry is enjoying a massive return on its investments in the United States political class, which includes at least $445 million spent to influence the 2024 elections. Despite global efforts to transition toward cleaner energy, the administration is slashing regulations and racing to approve new infrastructure that will ensure the continued burning of fossil fuels for decades — and massive profits for shareholders, Wall Street, and CEOs.

Even as some politicians echo increasingly dire warnings from scientists about the climate crisis, subsidies for the oil, gas, coal, and petrochemical sectors have only increased in recent years thanks to legislation passed under both the Biden and Trump administrations.

The GOP budget bill championed by Donald Trump and signed into law in July added nearly $40 billion in fossil fuel subsidies over the next decade, amounting to roughly $4 billion a year, while extending generous tax breaks for corporations and the ultra-wealthy, according to the report.

Joe Biden made ending fossil fuel subsidies a major part of his “build back better” agenda, but lawmakers added fossil fuel incentives during the final negotiations over Biden’s signature Inflation Reduction Act (IRA).

The IRA was heralded as a historic investment in clean energy, but Big Oil lobbied hard on the legislation as pro-industry lawmakers such as Sen. Joe Manchin demanded concessionsfrom Democrats and the White House. Like other recent spending bills, the IRA contains subsidies for carbon capture and fossil hydrogen projects, two controversial technologies aimed at prolonging the life of the oil and gas industry. 

Redirecting this flow of taxpayer dollars away from the fossil fuel industry could provide 3 million families with food assistance benefits annually.

To calculate total annual subsidies for fossil fuel production, Oil Change International examined billions of dollars’ worth of tax breaks, cheap access to drilling on public lands, regulatory loopholes, and direct public spending on cleaning up the mess that the industry leaves behind, including devastating oil spills and thousands of abandoned minesand oil and gas wells. The estimated annual $34.8 billion that the fossil fuel industry enjoys in subsidies, bailouts, tax breaks is likely an undercount, researchers said.

Collin Rees, the U.S. campaign manager at Oil Change International and author of the report, said taxpayers are spending $35 billion each year to prop a “polluting, expensive energy system instead of investing our public money into clean, affordable renewable energy.”

“The costs to the public of fossil fuel subsidies – both direct handouts to the industry and the deadly impacts to public health, local environments, and the climate – far outweigh the money being spent to lower energy prices for working families,” Rees said in an email. 

Some fossil fuel subsidies have been around for decades, and unlike tax breaks and incentives for wind and solar energy, are typically permanent and do not have to be renewed regularly with new legislation. For example, for over a century, oil and gas producers have deducted so-called “intangible drilling costs” from their taxes, which means companies can immediately deduct 100 percent of costs not related to the final operation of an oil and gas well, according to the report. That includes costs for basic industry preparatory expenses such as surveying and labor.

The federal government has directed other subsidies toward emerging technologies that the fossil fuel industry relies on for continued relevance as the climate crisis intensifies and renewable energy becomes increasingly popular and cheap. For years, the federal government has invested in technologies that capture and store carbon dioxide, which were once controversially billed as a climate solution but are now being used to enhance oil and gas extraction from aging wells.

The industry has spent years lobbying for carbon capture tax incentives, and spending bills signed by both Biden and Trump included new or expanded tax credits for carbon capture and storage. The GOP budget bill signed by Trump expanded these credits to encourage “enhanced oil recovery,” which involves injecting captured carbon dioxide into aging oil and gas wells to force out remaining reserves.

Environmentalists have long argued that carbon capture is not a solution to the climate crisis and only serves to prolong the life of the fossil fuel industry. A 2020 investigation by the Treasury Inspector General for Tax Administration found that approximately 90 percent of federal tax credits for carbon capture were improperly claimed, with 10 claimants receiving $894 million in tax credits without verifying that they had sequestered any carbon dioxide.

Congress expanded carbon capture tax breaks in 2022 and 2025. Government and independent estimates have found potential tax credit costs for carbon capture, utilization, and storage alone could amount to as much as $100 billion through 2031, $835 billion through 2042, or $3.6 trillion through 2050, according to the report.

Rees said researchers have found that a huge portion of fossil fuel subsidies are funneled into excess profits for fossil fuel companies. Redirecting this flow of taxpayer dollars away from the fossil fuel industry could provide 3 million families with food assistance benefits annually, according to Oil Change International. The same amount of funding could help 54 million households install solar panels within a decade. 

“Congress must stand up to Big Oil and Gas, eliminate fossil fuel subsidies, and redirect those billions toward the things our communities actually need: health care; housing; and clean, affordable, renewable energy,” Rees said.

https://truthout.org/articles/subsidies-for-fossil-fuel-firms-have-doubled-since-2017-now-35-billion-a-year/

 

YOURDEMOCRACY.NET RECORDS HISTORY AS IT SHOULD BE — NOT AS THE WESTERN MEDIA WRONGLY REPORTS IT.

 

         Gus Leonisky

         POLITICAL CARTOONIST SINCE 1951.

porat's climate...

Google’s President Loves Trump’s Anti-Climate Policies
BY
GEOFF DEMBICKI


Google’s president, Ruth Porat, has repeatedly expressed enthusiasm for the Trump administration’s pro–fossil fuel energy policies. Her comments suggest Big Tech is now prioritizing energy for data centers over its climate commitments.

At a recent artificial intelligence conference in Washington, DC, Google’s president cheered on Donald Trump’s interior secretary after he slammed Silicon Valley’s support of the so-called “climate extremist agenda” and pushed to expand the use of “incredibly clean” coal plants and other fossil fuels to power data centers, according to a previously unreported recording.

Following the speech by Interior Secretary Doug Burgum, Ruth Porat, president and chief investment officer of Google and Alphabet, told conference attendees that “I thought Secretary Burgum’s comments were fantastic. . . . Because I think it is very clear that to realize the potential of AI, you have to have the power to deliver it. And we have underinvested in this country, and to stay ahead, we need to actually address it head-on.”

Porat was speaking on a panel about how AI is “rewriting America’s future” alongside Big Tech leaders including venture capitalist Delian Asparouhov and Kevin Weil, the chief product officer for OpenAI, maker of ChatGPT. During the panel, Porat also discussed a Google white paperadvocating for US investments in natural gas and nuclear to power the industry’s energy-hungry data centers.

Porat’s remarks, captured in an April video of the influential 2025 Hill & Valley Forum, suggest Big Tech now is prioritizing fossil fuels for data centers over its climate commitments.

Google and other major tech companies as recently as a few years ago led the corporate world in acknowledging the seriousness of the climate emergency and proposing concrete actions to limit Silicon Valley’s carbon emissions. Porat’s company has for years positioned itself as a climate leader in the tech industry. Among its many promises? An ambitious 2020 pledge to power all its operations with carbon-free energy by 2030.

Yet Porat’s comments at the Hill & Valley Forum, and her subsequent praise in July for the Trump administration’s “energy abundance” agenda — which supports oil, gas, and coal while severely penalizing renewables such as wind and solar — signal that, at a time when climate action is under serious threat from Republicans, the country’s largest tech companies are wavering in their support for the cheapest, cleanest, and lowest-carbon energy sources.

That’s reflected in Google’s carbon emissions, which soared nearly 50 percent between 2019 and 2024, according to a company environmental report. An independent study from the NewClimate Institute, a German nonprofit, warned in August of a “crisis” for the tech giant’s ability to meet its climate targets, stating that “data centre expansion and higher artificial intelligence (AI) usage have rapidly increased Google’s electricity demand and absolute [greenhouse gas] emissions.”

Google didn’t respond to a media request about Porat’s comments.

“Climate Extremist Agenda”

Founded in 2021, the Hill & Valley Forum is an organization that brings together prominent tech executives and venture capitalists with federal policymakers. This year’s event, which took place in late April, featured the likes of Palantir CEO Alex Karp and billionaire venture capitalist Vinod Khosla, alongside politicians including Republican House speaker Mike Johnson.

The opening remarks were delivered by Burgum, a former North Dakota governor with close ties to the fossil fuel industry. As interior secretary, Burgum oversees management and conservation of federal land. Previous reporting showed that in 2024, months prior to being nominated by Trump for the position, Burgum hosted a private dinner for oil, gas, and coal executives.

Burgum, a Republican, used his speech to criticize Silicon Valley for having supported “the climate extremist agenda,” which he defined as the idea that “a degree of temperature change in the year 2100 is the thing that we should drive every policy in America.” Burgum added: “I’ve always been a little offended by that.”

Echoing common climate-denier talking points about the inability of climate models to predict future temperature rise, Burgum questioned “how a group could take a spreadsheet and extrapolate [climate] data for 90 years, 80 years, now 75 years and say ‘this is absolutely what’s going to happen.’”

He then positioned coal as an energy source that can power Big Tech’s data centers. “Any coal plant running in America today is incredibly clean,” he claimed without evidence. US power plant pollution is at its highest levels in three years due to a recent surge in generation from coal.

Burgum concluded by stating that accelerating production of American oil, gas, coal, and potentially some nuclear would be key to realizing Silicon Valley’s AI agenda.

“That’s the Trump plan, and that’s what we’re doing right now,” he said.

Google Leader on Burgum’s Vision for AI: “Fantastic”

Porat expressed no qualms with Burgum’s speech when she was asked about it on a panel later that day, instead stating that his “comments were fantastic.” Porat then elaborated that Google and the Trump administration were in agreement about needing to scale up nuclear production and modernize the electrical grid.

Five years ago, Google CEO Sundar Pichai warned that “we have until 2030 to chart a sustainable cause for our planet or face the worst consequences of climate change.” He outlined a plan to power its data centers by doing “things like pairing wind and solar power sources together, and increasing our use of battery storage.”

But at the Hill & Valley Forum, Porat outlined an energy agenda much more favorable to fossil fuels. During the panel, she touted a recent Google white paper that didn’t once mention wind or solar, even though they generally remain the cheapest form of power generation worldwide. The document instead called for federal investment in “affordable, reliable, and secure energy technologies, including geothermal, advanced nuclear, and natural gas generation with carbon capture (among other sources).”

Others at the conference voiced direct skepticism of renewable energy, including David Friedberg, cohost of the popular pro-Trump tech podcast All-In. “To scale up energy, it’s not about solar, it’s not about wind, those might have been nice from a narrative perspective, but scalable energy production requires these next-gen systems and we have to unlock that,” he claimed during a panel about reindustrializing America.

In reality, last year, nearly 93 percent of new power additions worldwide came from renewable sources.

Trump’s AI Action Plan

When the Trump administration unveiled its AI Action Plan in Washington, DC, in late July, the event was presented in the form of a live podcast hosted by Friedberg and his other All-In cohosts, as well as the founders of Hill & Valley.

“We need to build and maintain vast AI infrastructure and the energy to power it,” the plan reads. “To do that, we will continue to reject radical climate dogma and bureaucratic red tape, as the Administration has done since Inauguration Day.”

The plan claims that it will ensure free speech in AI systems by eliminating “references to misinformation, Diversity, Equity, and Inclusion, and climate change.” It further constricts federal spending to developers of the type of AI models, such as ChatGPT or Elon Musk’s Grok, “who ensure that their systems are objective and free from top-down ideological bias.”

Some climate groups were quick to condemn the proposal. “This U.S. AI Action Plan doesn’t just open the door for Big Tech and Big Oil to team up, it unhinges and removes any and all doors,” KD Chavez, executive director of the national advocacy group Climate Justice Alliance, said in a statement.

But if Google has any concerns about the anti-climate AI policies being pursued by the White House, the company isn’t showing it. At a mid-July AI event in Pennsylvania, Porat heaped more praise on the Trump administration.

“Mr President, thank you for your leadership and for your clear and urgent direction that our nation invest in AI infrastructure, technology and the energy to unlock its benefits so that America can continue to lead,” she said.

This article was first published by the Lever, an award-winning independent investigative newsroom.

https://jacobin.com/2025/08/google-porat-climate-fossil-fuels

 

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YOURDEMOCRACY.NET RECORDS HISTORY AS IT SHOULD BE — NOT AS THE WESTERN MEDIA WRONGLY REPORTS IT.

 

         Gus Leonisky

         POLITICAL CARTOONIST SINCE 1951.