U.S. Government Expands Subsidies to the Fossil Fuel Industry, Throwing Cold Water on the Migration to Renewable Energy
I expressed in a recent post how certain areas of the U.S., including Hawaii, can migrate to renewable energy very rapidly. The operative word there is “can” (expressing the possibility), as distinguished from “will” (expressing the future as it is likely to occur).
That’s because the U.S. government is further expanding the already large and obscene level of subsidies that the American taxpayers bestow upon the fossil fuel industry. Until and unless We The People can regain control of our government’s behavior in this arena, renewables will remain a minor contributor to the overall energy picture.
The Obama administration has only called for the elimination of ~4-5 billion/year of what they characterized as special breaks to fossil fuel companies. The rest of the “subsidies” cited here are just standard tax breaks that any company operating within the U.S. can claim. It’s quite natural that many of these standard accounting techniques (such as depreciation of new capital investment in equipment), would naturally increase as the volume of home-pumped oil increases.
But the real problem here is that the author you cited seems to have a child’s view of how government works: President Obama can call for eliminating these special subsidies, but he cannot actually do so himself without Congress.
Until we get a better congress, we’re sort of stuck, and blaming Obama for this is sort-of like blaming Obama when it rains on your picnic… or any of the other BS that the right wing clowns indulge in. The fact that the cited author has chosen to join the tea-party in their deification of Obama does not credit him.