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Report Exposes Hidden Fossil Fuel Costs Siphoning Off $12 Trillion From Society Every Year
"The economic case for fossil fuels has not just weakened, it has collapsed," said the head of 350.org, the group behind the publication.
Apr 21, 2026
Oil price spikes caused by the US and Israel's war in Iran are straining the pocketbooks of ordinary citizens the world over. But a new study shows that even in normal times, dependence on fossil fuels poses a tremendous financial cost while a small group of companies reaps the rewards.
The report published by the environmental group 350.org on Tuesday found that people around the world are subsidizing the fossil fuel industry to the tune of $12 trillion per year, a cost of about $1,400 for every person on Earth.
The number goes beyond direct government subsidies, with the report explaining that "ordinary people are paying for fossil fuels three times over."
The fossil fuel industry costs every person on Earth $1,400 a year — and pays almost nothing back.350.org's new #OutOfPocket report breaks it down. Santa Marta is the first conference ever called to end fossil fuels, and this report is the receipt.Read the full report: 350.org/out-of-pocke...
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— 350.org (@350.org) April 21, 2026 at 9:26 AM
In addition to the $636 billion in government handouts the International Monetary Fund (IMF) found were paid to fossil fuel companies in 2024, the public also has to bear the burden when conflict or other emergencies cause prices to spike.
The report estimates that during the first 50 days of the Iran war, consumers and businesses have paid an additional $158.6–$166.9 billion due to higher fuel costs. This comes not only at the gas pump, but through heightened costs for food, transport fees, and other basic necessities.
"This crisis is a stark reminder of just how risky it is to rely on fossil fuels, with around 80% of global energy still coming from them and driving the instability we see today," said Jan Rosenow, professor of energy and climate policy at Oxford University. "Price volatility is not a flaw in the fossil fuel system; it is a built-in feature."
An investigation published earlier this month by The Guardian found that while consumers are getting hit, the war has been a bonanza for Big Oil. The top 100 companies have raked in an extra $30 million per hour since it began and made $23 billion in windfall profits during the war's first month.
But the true mammoth cost to consumers comes from mitigating the climate damage caused by unrestrained fossil fuel use, from droughts to floods to heatwaves that have grown increasingly frequent and severe as global temperatures have climbed.
Using peer-reviewed data relied on by the US Environmental Protection Agency (EPA), 350.org estimated that the global population is footing the bill for about $9.3 trillion in climate-related damages and air-pollution-related deaths each year, social costs that the industry causes but pays almost nothing to solve.
The effects hit the poor hardest: Low-income households spend almost twice as large a share of their budgets on energy as higher-income households.
Meanwhile, renewable energy infrastructure, which has high upfront costs but pays for itself over time, is less abundant in developing parts of the world, and countries like Pakistan, Bangladesh, and South Sudan have had to ration power during energy crises.
The poorer Global South is also on the frontlines of some of the worst and most immediate effects of the climate crisis.
In addition to one of the deadliest ongoing conflicts in the world, South Sudan has suffered both severe floods and droughts that have ravaged crop outputs, raising the risk of famine, and schools have had to close for weeks as extreme heat caused children to faint from heat stroke.
Eastern Africa has dealt with the displacement of more than 20 million people from record-breaking floods and droughts.
In Sri Lanka, chronic flooding and pest outbreaks exacerbated by rising temperatures are expected to cost the country 3.5% of its gross domestic product by 2050.
Bill McKibben, the co-founder of 350.org, said that in the coming years, climate upheaval can only be expected to get worse.
"A building El Niño means 2026 and 2027 will set new global temperature records, and that will offer yet more chaos, and yet more reminders that it is the poorest people on Earth who must bear most of the cost of this ongoing tragedy," he said.
The research conducted by 350.org was built on a model used by the IMF, which found that fossil fuels were costing taxpayers about $7.4 trillion. However, that research rested on a carbon price of $85 per tonne of CO2 emitted into the atmosphere.
350.org found that this figure, which "represents the cheapest possible price to keep warming below 2°C," vastly understates the damage caused by warming, which peer-reviewed research suggests is between $185-233 per tonne.
While proponents of continued fossil fuel use often oppose green energy expansion on the grounds of cost, the report notes that just that $4.1 trillion undercount would be enough to finance more than 5,900 gigawatts of new solar capacity—enough to power every home in Africa, South Asia, and Latin America combined.
"The economic case for fossil fuels has not just weakened, it has collapsed," said Anne Jellema, 350.org's chief executive.
In addition to calling for an immediate end to both the war in Iran and Israel's war against Lebanon, 350.org called on governments around the world to tax the industry's wartime windfall profits and put the money toward lowering the energy bills of ordinary families.
The group also called to replace fossil fuel subsidies with household support and subsidies for cheaper renewables, which it says will be resistant to the shocks that oil and gas regularly face.
"Renewables are not controlled by a few fossil fuel-exporting countries," said Hala Kilani, the head of energy diplomacy for the international climate policy network REN21. "It is abundant, distributed, and affordable. It can stabilize costs and be deployed locally, empowering communities rather than concentrating power. It is a peace, development, and justice solution. It’s high time we transition to reliable, affordable renewable energy.”
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Trump Invokes Wartime Law to Fulfill 'Wish List for Oil, Gas, and Coal Industries'
"Trump is abusing emergency authorities and wasting taxpayer resources through unprecedented abuse of the Defense Production Act to promote his politically favored fossil fuel projects."
Apr 21, 2026
US President Donald Trump on Monday invoked wartime authority in an effort to boost domestic fossil fuel production—with the help of taxpayer funding—as his administration faces growing political backlash over gas price spikes, driven by the illegal assault on Iran.
The five presidential memos Trump signed cite his executive powers under the Cold War-era Defense Production Act, which gives the president the ability to expand and accelerate production of key supplies. Critics accused Trump of abusing his emergency authority, once again, to give handouts to an industry profiting massively from the Iran war, which the president launched without congressional authorization.
"President Trump is abusing emergency authorities and wasting taxpayer resources through unprecedented abuse of the Defense Production Act to promote his politically favored fossil fuel projects at the expense of energy affordability and common sense," said Tyson Slocum, energy director at the consumer watchdog Public Citizen. "Today’s unjustified suite of executive orders is a wish list for the oil, gas, and coal industries, who are already enjoying record profits under Trump’s Energy Unaffordability Agenda."
“America is already—far and away—the world’s largest oil and gas producer, and the world’s largest petroleum and gas exporter," Slocum added. "Promoting more fossil fuel exports at a time when Trump has failed to deliver affordable, sustainable energy for American communities is just another example of the president’s incompetent, failed energy policies."
Trump's memos aim to bolster petroleum, coal, and liquefied natural gas production, asserting that the nation's "current inadequate and intermittent energy supply leaves us vulnerable to hostile foreign actors and poses an imminent and growing threat to the United States’ prosperity and national security."
"Action to expand the domestic petroleum production, refining, and logistics capacity is necessary to avert an industrial resource or critical technology item shortfall that would severely impair national defense capability," the memos state.
Trump signed the directives hours after he publicly disagreed with his own energy secretary's assessment of when Americans can expect to see relief at the gas pump, where they're paying over $4 per gallon on average nationwide. US Energy Secretary Chris Wright said Americans might not see significantly lower gas prices until next year; Trump claimed that assessment was "totally wrong,” even as economists warned of lasting impacts to US and global energy markets stemming from the Iran war.
The world's largest oil and gas giants have profited massively from war-induced price spikes, with the biggest beneficiaries—including US-based Chevron and ExxonMobil—banking over $30 million an hour in windfall gains during the first month of the conflict.
Trump's memos came days after a group of Republican lawmakers in the House and Senate introduced legislation aimed at shielding fossil fuel companies from legal action to hold them accountable for their central role in the climate emergency.
“Big Oil companies have raked in massive profits at the pump while lying to the American people about the catastrophic harm of their products, and now they want to deny Americans their rightful day in court and stick taxpayers with the bill for the mess they made," Richard Wiles, president of the Center for Climate Integrity, said in response to the bill. "If fossil fuel companies have done nothing wrong, why do they need immunity?"
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Extreme Weather Is Sending Home Insurance Rates Through the Roof; Big Oil Should Pay
We and a growing number of lawmakers are proposing legislation to ensure that the companies that helped drive the climate crisis help pay their fair share of the ensuing damage.
Apr 18, 2026
It's not just your rising bills for groceries and healthcare. For many Americans, the affordability crisis is now showing up in skyrocketing costs to keep their homes insured, as communities are battered by worsening weather disasters fueled by climate change.
Our states and our constituents are feeling this directly. Hawai’i is picking up the pieces after several weeks of historic flooding, which caused more than $1 billion in damage and led to widespread evacuations. These costs are sure to increase home insurance rates that have already spiked by as much as 50% since August 2023, when out of control wildfires—worsened by climate change-driven drought conditions—devastated Maui.
In California, communities are still trying to recover from wildfires that tore through Los Angeles in January 2025. These fires stand as the most expensive wildfires in world history—causing more than $65 billion in damage, much of which is being passed onto the public through rising insurance premiums.
Although New York’s insurance market is not yet seeing the levels of climate-driven distress seen in other parts of the country, the average homeowner is paying $1,000 more for coverage in the years since Hurricane Ida—supercharged by warming oceans—caused over $9 billion in flooding damage. And the frequency of highly destructive storms is growing fast.
If a power company is responsible for the spark that ignites a fire, why not the fossil fuel giants that are turning much of the country into a tinderbox?
The average American homeowner isn’t responsible for this climate chaos; why are they the ones picking up the tab for the billions of dollars of damage it leaves in its wake? We and a growing number of lawmakers are proposing a better model: ensuring that the companies that helped drive this crisis help pay their fair share of the ensuing damage.
Large multinational oil and gas giants knew as far back as the 1970s that their dirty fossil fuel products would make weather disasters more destructive, but spent the ensuing decades lying to the public about their contribution to the problem. The real world harms of their deception is becoming increasingly clear, but they’re paying nearly none of the financial consequences.
That’s why we’re working to build a fairer system in our states—one that could be a model for the rest of the country. One that protects people from perpetually rising home insurance premiums by holding Big Oil accountable for their contribution to weather disasters that are a core driver of the affordability crisis in this country.
Our legislation would empower state attorneys general to bring civil actions against the largest oil and gas companies after major climate-driven disasters. Revenue recovered through legal action would be used to reimburse people dealing with higher rates, stabilize “insurer of last resort” programs, and reimburse homeowners facing rising premiums. At a time when housing affordability is already under strain, the growing instability in home insurance markets is making it even harder for families to buy, keep, and protect their homes.
The stakes couldn’t be higher—for individuals, not to mention the broader American housing market. Uninsurable properties are often unsellable properties, as mortgage lenders generally require that home buyers secure insurance.
Last year, Federal Reserve Chair Jerome Powell told the US Senate Banking Committee that in “10 or 15 years there are going to be regions of the country where you can’t get a mortgage” due to climate change. That ominous prediction seems overly conservative given that realtors in California and Colorado are already reporting pending home sales falling through due to climate risk.
Even as extreme weather becomes more common, more and more Americans are risking financial ruin and going without a safety net altogether. A recent poll in California found that a shocking 1 in 5 California homeowners don’t have insurance, with rising costs the most often cited reason.
Holding polluters accountable for their contribution to a weather disaster isn’t a radical idea. Insurance companies already routinely take utilities to court—and win large settlements—when unmaintained power lines ignite wildfires. If a power company is responsible for the spark that ignites a fire, why not the fossil fuel giants that are turning much of the country into a tinderbox?
The status quo of worsening disasters, perpetual insurance premium increases, and more uninsured families is clearly untenable. But it’s likely to persist until Big Oil companies pay their fair share for the weather chaos they knowingly brought about. It’s time for the fossil fuel giants driving the home insurance crisis to shoulder the growing financial burden, not everyday Americans.
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