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'Paying for Climate Chaos': Report Exposes $35 Billion a Year in US Handouts to Big Oil
"It's time to stop paying polluters to wreck our planet," said one environmental advocate.
Sep 09, 2025
Research and advocacy organization Oil Change International on Tuesday released a new report documenting the massive subsidies that fossil fuel companies receive from the US government every year.
The report, titled "Paying for Climate Chaos," found that the government will hand out $34.8 billion to big oil and gas companies this year, and that these companies are set to get almost an additional $4 billion in subsidies thanks to the so-called "One Big Beautiful Bill Act" passed by congressional Republicans and signed into law by US President Donald Trump earlier this year.
Among the added benefits fossil fuel companies receive from the GOP's budget law are $1.2 billion in the form of reduced royalty rates for extracting oil and gas on public lands; $720 million from a delay in the implementation of a per-ton methane emissions fee; and $359 million from the expansion of a corporate tax exemption to include categories such as carbon capture and hydrogen storage.
The report found that total subsidies to fossil fuel companies had grown significantly since Oil Change International first began studying the issue back in 2017 when subsidies totaled a comparatively modest $20 billion.
What's more, it noted that the price tag for these subsidies only looks set to increase over the next decade.
"Many subsidies identified are projected to soar over the next decade and beyond," Oil Change International writes. "If federal leaders fail to act, fossil fuel production subsidies could skyrocket to hundreds of billions of dollars per year. This is due to the recent introduction of new subsidies for carbon capture, utilization, and storage and hydrogen, which increase fossil fuel production."
The report concluded by urging federal lawmakers to repeal the billions handed out in fossil fuel subsidies every year, including the recently passed ones for carbon capture and fossil hydrogen. It also said a future administration should "end subsidies across federal agencies, including the US Department of Energy, US Army Corps of Engineers, Bureau of Land Management, Bureau of Ocean Energy Management," and others.
Collin Rees, US campaign manager for Oil Change International, called these subsidies particularly wasteful in light of cuts Republicans made to programs such as Medicaid and the Supplemental Nutritional Assistance Program as part of their budget law.
"Congress must stand up to big oil and gas, eliminate fossil fuel subsidies, and redirect those billions toward the things our communities actually need: healthcare, housing, and clean, affordable, renewable energy," he said. "It's time to stop paying polluters to wreck our planet. The Trump administration's fossil-fueled corruption and attacks on working people provide an opportunity for a new agenda grounded in a bold vision to end the fossil fuel era."
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Trump and Wright Are Turning America Into a Gas Station Masquerading as a Nation
Much of what they’ve been doing—from cutting funding for the arts to cancelling major renewable projects—seems designed to insure that fracked gas will be our central legacy.
Sep 09, 2025
Way back in January of 2015, six months before Donald Trump began America’s escalator-like descent, Sen. John McCain of Arizona took to the floor of the Senate to describe Russia as “a gas station masquerading as a country.” He was responding to the invasion of Crimea, and demanding the US stand up to Moscow; within a few weeks others has shortened his bon mot to “gas station with nukes.” It hit at an essential truth: Russia, for all its size and might, hadn’t developed much of anything in recent decades; Vladimir Putin survived by pumping gas to the rest of the world, resting on the weapons his Soviet predecessors had bequeathed him.
Eight months into the second Trump administration, what are we? The president and his minions have been enriching themselves, and doing it by stripping the state that better women and men had built in the decades before. Our scientific and medical prowess? Our great universities? Our shared culture, from public broadcasting to the National Endowment for the Arts to the Kennedy Center? Even our history, as the Smithsonian comes under attack. But we still have a lot of fracked gas, dammit! And—viewed one way—much of what they’ve been doing seems designed to insure that fracked gas will be our central legacy.
On the list of odd things the administration has done, shutting down work on offshore wind projects off the New England coast may be among the oddest. These projects are enormous investments, have been in the works for many years, and have acquired (with painful slowness) the necessary permits. Now, just as they’re coming online, they’re being shut down. I can’t really think of any equivalent—it’s as if, in the 19th century we built the Erie Canal and then decided, forget it, let’s keep using wagons. It’s as if in the 20th century, we built the interstate highway system and then decided to simply seal off the exits and let it just lie there unused. What kind of logic turns a paid-for and productive asset into an aqueous Stonehenge?
This kind of logic: If those turbines start funneling electricity into New England, they won’t need to burn as much natural gas to produce electricity. They won’t need the new pipelines that Big Oil wants to build north. And who would that hurt? Well, Christopher Wright is Trump’s secretary of energy. He was formerly CEO of Liberty Energy, the nation’s second-largest fracking firm. Here’s how the Energy Department describes his background (after describing him as a “dedicated humanitarian”):
He founded Pinnacle Technologies and served as CEO from 1992 to 2006. Pinnacle created the hydraulic fracture mapping industry, and its innovations helped launch commercial shale gas production in the late 1990s. Chris was chairman of Stroud Energy, an early shale gas producer, before selling to Range Resources in 2006. Most recently, Chris served as chairman and CEO of Liberty Energy, where his team helped to expand the shale revolution to include oil as well as natural gas.
And here’s Christopher Wright, speaking at the Council on Foreign Relations on the eve of a trip to Europe next week to “promote American gas.” According to him, the Paris climate accords are “silly” and “climate change, for impacting the quality of your life, is not incredibly important. In fact, if it wasn’t in the news, in the media, you wouldn’t know.”
I have my guesses how well this will go down with Wright’s European hosts—the continent has just endured its worst wildfire season since record-keeping began. Portugal, Spain, and Greece have been especially hard hit; France recorded its biggest wildfire since at least 1949, which shrouded much of the country in smoke. As one local mayor said, “Everything is burned. More than half or three-quarters of the village has burned down. It’s hellish, a lunar landscape.” Even that green and pleasant isle of England has had its worst fire season ever, which makes sense since it was the hottest summer in UK history.
But for the moment let’s forget about Europe, and indeed about climate change, and instead focus on East Coast electricity users, because they’ll be paying the highest price for Wright’s folly. Canary Media’s Jeff St. John, in an epic account last week, laid out the costs of shutting down a massive source of supply that regional energy planners had been counting on:
It would leave a gaping hole in New England’s energy mix, driving up the region’s already-high electricity prices and leaving its grid more vulnerable to collapse during winter storms. New England’s grid operator has already factored the 704-megawatt wind farm into its plans starting next year. Delaying delivery of that power “will increase risks to reliability,” ISO New England warned in a statement last week.
In fact, that warning from the ISO, or Independent System Operator, in New England is worth reading. It comes from a largely anonymous agency charged with keeping the region online:
“Unpredictable risks and threats to resources—regardless of technology—that have made significant capital investments, secured necessary permits, and are close to completion will stifle future investments, increase costs to consumers, and undermine the power grid’s reliability and the region’s economy now and in the future,” ISO New England said in the statement.
That’s not the language these guys usually use. Abe Silverman, a Johns Hopkins researcher, called it “unprecedented.” But then, so is taking a huge energy generator offline for no reason:
“We’re talking about a really significant hit to consumers, at a time we’re all hyper-concerned about inflation and energy prices generally,” Silverman said. Losing Revolution Wind’s electricity could cost New England consumers about $500 million a year, he estimated, based on the value the project has secured in ISO New England’s forward capacity market and its potential to supplant costlier power plants used during grid emergencies.
And “we don’t need a bunch of fancy studies to tell us that these units are needed for reliability,” he said. New England has long struggled to meet electricity demand during winter cold snaps and summer heatwaves. When temperatures surpassed 100°F for several days in June, “they had every single generator on,” he said. “Here we have a unit that should be operating as of next summer that is now in doubt.”
But it’s during the winter months that the loss of Revolution Wind could be most keenly felt, said Susan Muller, a senior energy analyst at the Union of Concerned Scientists. That’s when the region’s limited supply of fossil gas is stretched even thinner, since the fuel is used both for building heating and power generation. ISO New England is banking on offshore wind—which blows most strongly in the winter—to meet energy needs as temperatures plummet.
As the Times reported, “Revolution Wind was expected to generate electricity for more than 350,000 homes at 9.8 cents per kilowatt-hour, a rate that would be locked in for 20 years and is cheaper than the average cost of electricity in New England, according to America’s Clean Power.” In fact, a new study released last week found that if Revolution Wind had been in operation last year, it would have saved consumers $400 million, lowering their energy prices 11% and “insulating ratepayers from expensive, volatile natural gas.” Given America’s insane levels of inequality, that might not mean much to “humanitarian” Wright: he sold his fracking stock for $53 million when he took the Energy Department job. But I live in New England—I know lots of people who have trouble paying their power bills.
There is no mystery here. Across the country, as Princeton’s Jesse Jenkins was the latest to point out, the old canard about renewable electricity being expensive is simply not true—many states with more wind have cheap power prices. It’s not less reliable; with new batteries just the opposite is true. In fact, in the heart of the shale fracking belt in Texas, the head of the state’s Energy Reliability Council said earlier this summer that its blackout risk had been greatly reduced. Read the numbers here to get a sense of how backwards Wright and Trump have it:
The addition of more than 9,600 megawatts of capacity to the state’s grid since last summer, coupled with conservative operations and reliable management, has produced this result, Vegas said at an ERCOT board of directors meeting this week.
“The state of the grid is strong, it is reliable—it is as reliable as it has ever been and it is as ready for the challenges of extreme weather,” Vegas said. “I feel confident that we are ready for this upcoming summer season.”
Of the new capacity added, 5,395 megawatts came from solar, 3,821 megawatts from energy storage and 253 megawatts from wind power. Kristi Hobbs, ERCOT’s vice president of system planning and weatherization, said the risk of emergency as the sun goes down and Texans continue to pump their air conditioners has been greatly reduced due to the large contributions from solar and battery storage.
“That does put us in a better position to get over those evening ramps as we go into late summer,” Hobbs said.
In the same time frame of the solar and storage additions, there’s been a net loss of natural gas capacity. Retirements, deactivations, and derates, or a loss of available capacity, of gas plants, resulted in a reduced capacity of 366 megawatts on the grid since last summer.
I am pretty sure that Christopher Wright knows all this. He tweeted out the other day that “wind and solar energy infrastructure is essentially worthless when it is dark outside, and the wind is not blowing.” This is not a mistake, I think; it’s a lie. Surely he’s heard about batteries, and surely he knows that they’re now one of the biggest sources of nighttime supply in California because they’ve been soaking up sunshine all afternoon.
But Wright and Trump don’t care about consumers of electricity. They don’t care about the big companies building the wind farms that they’re driving close to bankruptcy (these, remember, are competitors with Big Oil). They don’t care about the thousands of jobs lost in the process. Here’s how the head of the Building Trades unions described the stop work order:
Let’s call the Department of the Interior’s stop-work order for Revolution Wind what it is: President Donald Trump just fired 1,000 of our members who had already labored to complete 80% of this major energy project. A “stop-work order” is the fancy bureaucratic term, but it means one thing: throwing skilled American workers off the job after they’ve spent a decade training, building, and delivering.
This project isn’t some pipe dream; it’s real steel in the water and $1.3 billion in investment already on the ground. And with the stroke of a pen late on a Friday, President Trump personally signed off on killing these jobs and creating chaos. He pulled the plug on an almost-finished project, taking jobs, paychecks, and food off the tables of working families in Connecticut and Rhode Island.
No, I think it’s pretty clear that Trump and Wright are engaged in an effort to turn America into a—well, a gas station masquerading as a nation. They’ve already coerced New York Gov. Kathy Hochul into potentially allowing a natural gas pipeline through the state in return for allowing work to continue on the Empire State’s offshore wind project. They’re now at work on Massachusetts Gov. Maura Healey, and she appears to be caving; in truth, she may not have much choice. If the federal government cuts off the biggest and cheapest source of energy supply, she still has to keep the lights on and furnaces running.
Exactly the same thing that’s happening with wind is happening with solar—a new report Sunday warns that that “these policies could cut 44 GW of US solar growth by 2030—an 18% decline. Compared with pre-HR1 forecasts, that’s a total loss of 55 GW, or 21% fewer solar projects by 2030”:
“Solar and storage are the backbone of America’s energy future, delivering the majority of new power to the grid at the lowest cost to families and businesses,” said SEIA president and CEO Abigail Ross Hopper. She added that the administration is “deliberately stifling investment, which is raising energy costs for families and businesses, and jeopardizing the reliability of our electric grid.”
And if New England’s wind farms make an easy target because these states voted against Trump, that’s not true of the solar damage: “This year, 77% of new solar capacity has been built in states Trump won. Eight of the top 10 states for new installations—Texas, Indiana, Arizona, Florida, Ohio, Missouri, Kentucky, and Arkansas—all went red in 2024.”
This is an all-out effort to stifle competition with Big Oil. It could not be more cynical—it’s the Putin playbook, producing misery for normal people and big profits for politically connected oligarchs. That’s what “energy dominance” means. It won’t work in the rest of the world, I think—just at random, here’s a story about how battery storage is surging in Pakistan and another about the spread of solar to Brazil’s poor urban favelas and another about the island that Belgium is building to anchor its wind industry, and another about how even fast-growing India is now using less fossil fuel to generate electricity. Globally, solar construction surged 64% in the first half of the year.
So the world will continue on its rational course. But the US is now building solar at only about 8% of the pace of the Chinese. If this looting succeeds here at home, than in a decade foreign tourists who can still get a visa will arrive to gawk at the colonial Williamsburg of internal combustion, to see how primitive societies powered their lives. By then Trump will be gone, and Wright will still have his millions. For the rest of us, at least we will still have nuclear weapons to make us a “great nation,” just like Russia
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'A Mockery of Science': Experts Slam Trump DOE's Climate Report in New Paper
"The goal is clear," said one of the experts. "To justify inaction and avoid meaningful emissions reductions."
Sep 02, 2025
The US Department of Energy's July climate report is "biased, full of errors, and not fit to inform policymaking," according to a comprehensive review released Tuesday by a group of 85 scientists who reviewed the document independently.
The department's "Climate Working Group" drew up the report as part of the effort by US President Donald Trump to fatally undermine the Environmental Protection Agency's (EPA) determination, commonly known as the "endangerment finding," that greenhouse gases like carbon dioxide and methane endanger human lives by warming the planet.
"If successful," Andrew Dessler, a climate scientist at Texas A&M, says, "this move could unravel virtually every US climate regulation on the books, from car emissions standards to power plant rules."
The Energy Department's nearly 150-page paper, titled "A Critical Review of the Impacts of Greenhouse Gas Emissions on the US Climate." Dessler describes its five authors as "climate contrarians who dispute mainstream science." The team behind the report, he argues, was "hand-picked" by Energy Secretary Chris Wright to lend legitimacy to the Trump administration's predetermined conclusions about climate science.
The DOE report's five authors seek to contradict the much more rigorous analyses conducted by groups like the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC), whose reports have been written by over a thousand researchers and which cite tens of thousands of academic studies.
The multinational panel has concluded that human fossil fuel usage has considerably warmed the planet, causing increased amounts of extreme weather, threatening food and water security, destroying ecosystems, and risking dangerous amounts of sea-level rise.
The Energy Department's report advances the main idea that climate scientists like those at the IPCC broadly "overstate" the extent of the human-caused climate crisis as well as its risks. Unlike other research of its kind, the department crafted its report in secret, which prompted the expert response.
"Normally, a report like this would undergo a rigorous, unbiased, and transparent peer review," said Dr. Robert Kopp, a climate and sea-level researcher at Rutgers. "When it became clear that DOE wasn't going to organize such a review, the scientific community came together on its own, in less than a month, to provide it."
Their review found that the Energy Department's report "exhibits pervasive problems with misrepresentation and selective citation of the scientific literature, cherry-picking of data, and faulty or absent statistics."
For instance, the report claims that there is "no obvious acceleration in sea-level rise" even though the number of days of high-tide coastal flooding per year has increased more than 10-fold since the 1970s.
It also attempts to portray CO2 emissions as a net benefit to the environment, particularly agriculture, by pointing to its benefits for crop growth, but ignores that the impact of increased droughts and wildfires far outweighs those benefits.
And it attempts to pick out isolated historical weather events like the Dust Bowl during the 1930s as evidence that dramatic climatic changes happen very frequently within short amounts of time and that the unprecedented increase in global temperatures over the past century and a half is not worthy of alarm.
"My reading of the report uncovered numerous errors of commission and omission, all of which slant toward a conclusion that human-caused climate change poses no serious risks," said Kerry Emmanuel, a meteorologist and climate scientist who specializes in hurricane physics. "It seems to work backward from a desired outcome."
Dessler notes that over 99% of the literature included in the IPCC's report was simply ignored by the Department of Energy. He described the report as a "mockery of science" akin to a "Soviet show trial."
"The outcome of this exercise by the Department of Energy is already known: climate science will be judged too uncertain to justify the endangerment finding," he said. "Once you understand that, everything about the DOE report makes total sense."
In 2025, the US National Weather Service issued a record number of flash flood warnings, while 255 million Americans were subject to life-threatening triple-digit temperatures in June. The previous year, 48 of 50 US states faced drought conditions, the most ever recorded in US history, while nearly 9 million acres burned due to wildfires.
"We live in a world where the impacts of climate change are increasingly being felt by citizens all around the globe—including communities throughout the US," said Andra Gardner, a professor of environmental science at Rowan University.
"This is perhaps what makes the DOE Climate Working Group report most astounding," she continued. "In a country where we have the tools to not only understand the impacts of climate change but also to begin meaningfully combating the crisis, the current DOE has instead decided to promote fossil fuel interests that will further worsen the symptoms of climate change with a report that turns a blind eye to the established science."
According to an analysis from Climate Power published in January, oil and gas industry donors gave $96 million in direct donations to the campaign of Donald Trump and affiliated super PACs during the 2024 election, while spending $243 million to lobby Republicans in Congress.
The result has been an administration that has purged climate science information from federal websites, laid off thousands of EPA employees, and gutted government funding for wind and solar energy.
Becca Neumann, an associate professor in the Civil and Environmental Engineering Department at the University of Washington, says that "the goal" of the report "is clear: to justify inaction and avoid meaningful emissions reductions."
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