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fossil fuel subsidies
Trump's Iran War Has Proved We Need to Get Off Fossil Fuels
Starting a stupid and criminal war is probably the dumbest way to wake the world up to the need to kick their and our collective oil and gas addiction, but here we are.
Oct 03, 2026
The price of oil has come down marginally this past week, largely because the Iranians are letting oil tankers transit the Gulf of Hormuz (presumably in an effort to work out a peace deal with President Donald Trump).
Meanwhile, though, the big lesson the world seems to have learned because of Trump’s fiasco—other than that our military is under the control of an irresponsible alcoholic and a narcissist and unreliable wannabe king—is that it’s high time to get off fossil fuels.
Starting a stupid and criminal war is probably the dumbest way to wake the world up to the need to kick their and our collective addiction, but here we are: The war has done more to encourage conservation and the transition to renewables than any other single effort by anybody anywhere in recent memory.
Instead of subsidizing fossil fuels to jack the profits of the companies that fund the GOP, we should be taxing them the way Europe does and using that money to turn every American roof into a power plant.
A new report from the International Energy Agency found that global demand for oil has fallen 2.5% this year, the equivalent of taking 42 million gas-burning cars off the road.
I’ve been watching all this from an odd vantage point. Three years ago we put solar panels and batteries on our all-electric house, where our winter electric bills had been running as high as $200 a month.
Now, the only time we buy electricity at all is in the dead of winter, and even then it costs a fraction of what it used to because I can download power at night when it’s cheapest. Between that and having an electric car I charge off my rooftop, energy prices exploding because of Trump’s and Bibi’s war haven’t much affected us directly.
But such benefits shouldn’t be limited to people who can afford to put solar panels on their roofs and live in blue states with huge solar subsidies. Every American should have such an option.
I first understood how this could work for an entire country back in September of 2009, when I was invited to join German Member of Parliament Hermann Scheer as a keynote speaker at a conference at the Centre de Cultura Contemporània de Barcelona.
Almost a decade earlier, Scheer had shepherded his “100,000 Rooftops” program through the German Parliament and was eager to talk about how it worked and how it could work in Spain. As he laid out the concept to me over lunch, it was simple and elegant.
Banks would loan people the money to put rooftop solar on their houses at a super-low interest rate, with defaults backstopped by the government so there was no risk to the bank and they could make money on a super-low-interest loan. Power utilities would buy surplus power from those homes at a “feed-in tariff” rate that was higher than the retail price of electricity until the bank loans were paid off, typically in five to ten years.
The rates were set so that if the monthly loan payments on your rooftop system were $100, the local utility would be paying you around the same $100 a month. When the loan was paid off you’d own a solar system that would last for decades, and you’d have gotten it for free.
The extra expense to the utilities for those payments to consumers would still cost less than building a new power plant. The system let the Germans decommission a few and avoid building any new nuclear plants.
Politics intervened, of course, and the program wasn’t implemented as cleanly as Scheer described it to me, but it got a long way there, even though he died the following year at just 66. Today well over a million German homes have both solar panels and battery storage, and solar covers around 14% of the country’s electricity, all of it in the cloudiest country in Europe at the same latitude as Calgary, Canada.
And the rest of the world is following following at a faster and faster rate. The IEA now expects electric vehicles to make up a record 29% of all the cars sold on Earth this year, with sales records set in 50 countries last quarter as fuel prices from Trump’s war pushed drivers away from gasoline and diesel.
In the European Union overall, EVs are now more than 30% of sales and over 50% in China; they’re nearly 100% of sales in some countries like Norway. Here in America they’re just a pathetic 5.8% this year.
What explains the growing enthusiasm for electric cars around the world and here in America is, in large part, the price of fuel.
For a century in America the price of oil and its refined products has left out most of what they truly cost us. It doesn’t include the cancers and the asthma, the wildfires and the floods, or the wars we fight to keep tankers moving through places like the Strait of Hormuz.
Economists call these externalities, and the International Monetary Fund puts the worldwide total at $7 trillion a year in costs—subsidies, really—that the fossil fuel industry hands off to the rest of us. As I laid out in The Last Hours of Ancient Sunlight, we’ve been burning through millions of years of stored sunlight as if it were free of any real costs or externalities.
We figured out how to handle this problem of paying for externalities and discouraging destructive behavior long ago with alcohol and tobacco, which we tax heavily both to discourage their use and to pay for some of the damage they do to our individual health and to our society.
Europe has taxed fuel that way for decades. Germans pay upwards of $3 a gallon in fuel taxes, while our federal gas tax has been stuck at 18.4 cents since 1993.
And you can see the results in any European town: People drive smaller cars and fewer miles, they take the train, and because driving is expensive they walk to the bakery and the hardware store down the street, which also has the added benefit of boosting Europeans’ health while keeping their money circulating in the local economy.
A high price cuts consumption whether it comes from a war or from a tax, but what separates the two is where the money ends up.
- When a war drives up the price of oil, the extra dollars flow to fossil fuel companies and dictatorial petrostates as windfall profits.
- When a tax does it, the money belongs to us. It can go right back to working families as a rebate check or EV subsidy, and it can pay for the kind of loan guarantees that put solar on all those German roofs.
Europe is now extending the principle to trade with a carbon charge at its border, which is the closest the world has yet come to the international price on carbon we need to make it reflect the very real damage it’s doing to our lives and environment.
None of this is happening here in the United States, however, because of the Republican Party’s Faustian bargain with the fossil fuel industry.
Ronald Reagan took Jimmy Carter’s solar panels off the White House roof to make his oil industry donors happy, and every Republican administration since has handed our public lands and resources to the industry at giveaway prices while the industry pours money into gifts, trips, and Republicans’ campaigns.
Trump made the deal explicit at Mar-a-Lago in 2024 when he asked oil executives for a billion dollars and promised to gut our climate rules in return, a promise he’s kept by killing the wind, solar, and EV incentives that would’ve let millions of American families do what we did with our house and car (both bought and installed with credits from the Obama administration and our enlightened Oregon state government).
So when the price of gas and diesel begins to fall back and Trump and the GOP start taking credit, remember what this year proved: Instead of subsidizing fossil fuels to jack the profits of the companies that fund the GOP, we should be taxing them the way Europe does and using that money to turn every American roof into a power plant.
Call your members of Congress through the Capitol Switchboard at 202-224-3121 and tell them you want fossil fuels priced at what they really cost us and rooftop solar financed the way Germany did it.
And if you found this useful, please share it with your friends and family and consider subscribing to and supporting The Hartmann Report, because reader-supported media is how ideas like these get past the industry’s wall of money.
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US Tax Payers Are Funding the Industry That Is Destroying Our Earth
Aggressive Big Oil lobbying has secured enormous government giveaways so extensive that the largest US oil and gas companies now pay more in taxes to foreign governments than to the US Treasury.
Dec 06, 2025
For more than a century, Big Oil lobbying has tyrannized American climate and tax policy, driving climate catastrophe while deepening economic inequality. Lavish tax breaks and subsidies for fossil fuel companies help explain why corporate giants like Chevron enjoy single-digit tax rates—lower than what many nurses or firefighters pay. After fossil fuel lobbyists flooded COP30 in unprecedented numbers, outnumbering nearly every other country’s delegation and stalling calls for a rapid fossil fuel phaseout, it’s more transparent than ever how the fossil fuel industry maintains its grip on global climate policy.
In the US, aggressive Big Oil lobbying has secured enormous government giveaways so extensive that the largest US oil and gas companies now pay more in taxes to foreign governments than to the US Treasury, finds a recent report by the FACT Coalition.
The report analyzed the financial disclosures of 11 US oil and gas companies with extensive overseas operations and concluded that decades of heavy industry lobbying has engineered a US tax code that pays for a dying fossil fuel industry, specifically for new oil and gas development abroad.
At the report’s launch in DC earlier this fall, Sen. Sheldon Whitehouse (D-RI) explained how US taxpayers are effectively forced to subsidize fossil fuel production through a tax code highly favorable to Big Oil. The report’s researchers explained that under the Global Intangible Low-Taxed Income (GILTI) regime, multinational companies that shift operations offshore already receive a 50% income tax deduction. But Big Oil lobbying has successfully created special exemptions allowing the largest fossil fuel companies to bypass all US tax on foreign oil and gas extraction income.
US taxpayers not only subsidize the fossil-fuel industry by nearly $35 billion every year, they also shoulder more than $100 billion annually in climate-related costs.
As a result, despite producing more oil and gas domestically than in all other countries combined, American multinational oil and gas companies collectively pay more in taxes to foreign governments than to the US. While domestic operations account for more than 57% of total upstream production among the companies studied in the report, they generate less than a quarter of total taxes due.
Before Trump’s 2017 tax law, corporate income earned abroad from refining, transporting, and selling oil was taxed immediately at the full US rate. But Trump’s Big Oil tax breaks shifted this income into GILTI. Although the 2022 Inflation Reduction Act (IRA) tried to curtail government subsidies to fossil fuels, the 2025 “One Big Beautiful Bill” expanded 2017-level tax giveaways, including more direct incentives for foreign drilling. To secure the sweeping benefits contained in the 2025 tax law, the industry’s largest players spent nearly $20 million lobbying Congress in the six months preceding the bill’s passage.
The bill adds $30.8 billion per year in existing subsidies for the fossil fuel industry, restores federal royalty rates to their pre-IRA levels of 12.5-16.7%, and introduces a new carve out allowing oil and gas companies to deduct intangible drilling costs (IDCs)—which represent 60-80% of total well expenses—from income subject to the Corporate Alternative Minimum Tax (CAMT) (a 15% minimum tax on corporations earning more than $1 billion in book profits). The president of the American Petroleum Institute (API), said that Trump’s 2025 tax reform “includes almost all of our priorities.”
Allowing the wishes of Big Oil to take precedent over the well-being of people and the planet is dooming our shared ecosystem. Today, US taxpayers not only subsidize the fossil-fuel industry by nearly $35 billion every year, they also shoulder more than $100 billion annually in climate-related costs. A Brookings study estimates that climate change now costs the average US household $220 to $570 per year.
Our government continues to prop up oil and gas companies over people and the planet, and is fueling climate disaster at home and abroad.
Meanwhile, the companies driving these damages continue to profit. Chevron and ExxonMobil rank among the world’s five highest-emitting corporations, and a 2025 Nature study estimates that each is responsible for nearly $2 trillion in climate damages. The report notes that federal handouts to US fossil fuel companies operating overseas are especially damaging. They erode the US tax base, accelerate the climate crisis, undermine American energy independence, and fail to generate well-paying domestic jobs.
Working-class people are paying for the continued life support of an already dying industry that’s fueling the climate crisis. Erich Pica, president of Friends of the Earth, noted during the report launch that without federal subsidies, 60% of US oil and gas production would be economically unviable. This sentiment has been well known by economic and political advisers across the political spectrum for decades. For instance, the report quotes Kevin Hassett, a current Trump top economic adviser, who said in a 2006 article that, “ending subsidies for fossil fuel production would level the playing field among energy sources and shift us from a policy of promoting fossil fuel supply to encouraging a reduction in fossil fuel consumption.” The entrenched government support incentivizing our current extractive economy starves the renewable energy sector of crucial federal investment necessary to curb polluting emissions. And eliminating these tax breaks would save US taxpayers more than $75 billion over the next decade.
The FACT Coalition recommends several essential reforms to counter traditional pro-oil tax policies. Eliminating domestic fossil fuel tax preferences and subsidies that fund oil and gas production abroad, ensuring that multinational corporations cannot shift production overseas to scapegoat domestic tax rates, and strengthening corporate tax transparency policy to include how much companies pay in taxes country-by-country.
“Tax fairness is climate justice,” Whitehouse concluded his remarks at the report launch.
Corporate and political greed deepens multigenerational economic vulnerability by eroding safety nets like the Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program and Medicaid, while financially and politically killing the potential of a thriving renewable energy sector that could create stable, well-paying jobs to replace those declining under Big Oil. Our government continues to prop up oil and gas companies over people and the planet, and is fueling climate disaster at home and abroad. We must refuse to let our paychecks fund the industry that is destroying our homes, our lands, and our loved ones.
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Sanders-Omar Bill Would Repeal Big Oil 'Welfare' in Trump Budget Law
"We are done letting fossil fuel executives write the rules while our communities pay the price," said Rep. Ilhan Omar.
Jul 25, 2025
Two progressive lawmakers are teaming up to take down the subsidies for fossil fuel companies contained in the recently passed Republican budget law.
U.S. Sen. Bernie Sanders (I-Vt.) and Rep. Ilhan Omar (D-Minn.) on Friday introduced a bill that is an update of a 2012 Sanders bill to repeal the nearly $200 billion worth of federal subsidies and tax loopholes that they describe as "welfare" for oil and gas companies.
While the United States has long provided such subsidies to fossil fuel companies, Sanders and Omar noted that the GOP budget law recently signed by President Donald Trump adds roughly "$20 billion in new subsidies for coal, oil drilling, methane emissions, pipelines, and other false climate solutions."
Among the budget law's expenses singled out by the lawmakers are $1.48 billion for the production of metallurgical coal, up to $3 billion for power plant owners to transport carbon, a $447 million initiative aimed at helping fossil fuel companies avoid having to pay the corporate minimum tax, and $1.5 billion in tax breaks for methane-emitting polluters.
"Donald Trump has sold out the young people of America and future generations," said Sanders. "Big Oil spent $450 million to elect Donald Trump and Republicans during the last election cycle. In return, the president has directed the full regulatory, legal, and financial weight of the federal government toward helping his fossil fuel executive friends get rich at the expense of a healthy and habitable planet for our kids and grandkids."
Omar said that "we are done letting fossil fuel executives write the rules while our communities pay the price."
"For decades, Big Oil has raked in billions in taxpayer handouts while destabilizing our climate," she added. "The End Polluter Welfare Act will finally hold polluters accountable and eliminate these harmful subsidies once and for all. I'm proud to reintroduce this legislation with Sen. Sanders because our planet can't wait, and neither can we."
In addition to Omar and Sanders, Sens. Elizabeth Warren (D-Mass.), Jeff Merkley (D-Ore.), Peter Welch (D-Vt.), Chris Van Hollen (D-Md.), Ed Markey (D-Mass.) and Cory Booker (D-N.J.) have signed on as co-sponsors of the bill, as have more than 20 lawmakers in the House of Representatives. Hundreds of nonprofit advocacy organizations, including the Sierra Club, Public Citizen, and Friends of the Earth U.S., have also endorsed the bill.
The GOP's budget package tore up most of the renewable energy subsidies and initiatives that were passed by Democrats in 2022 as part of the Inflation Reduction Act.
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UN Expert Calls for 'Defossilization' of World Economy, Criminal Penalties for Big Oil Climate Disinformation
Fossil fuel companies have for decades "instilled doubt about the need to act on, and the viability of, renewables," said U.N. climate expert Elisa Morgera.
Jun 30, 2025
As health officials across Europe issued warnings Monday about extreme heat that could stretch into the middle of the week in several countries—the kind of dangerous conditions that meteorologists have consistently said are likely to grow more frequent due to human-caused climate change—a top United Nations climate expert told the international body in Geneva that the "defossilization" of all the world's economies is needed.
Elisa Morgera, the U.N. special rapporteur on climate change, presented her recent report on "the imperative of defossilizing our economies," with a focus on the wealthy countries that are projected to increase their extraction and use of fossil fuels despite the fact that "there is no scientific doubt that fossil fuels... are the main cause of climate change."
"Despite overwhelming evidence of the interlinked, intergenerational, severe, and widespread human rights impacts of the fossil fuel life cycle," said Morgera, "these countries have and are still accruing enormous profits from fossil fuels, and are still not taking decisive action."
World leaders must recognize the phase-out of fossil fuels "as the single most impactful health contribution" they could make, she argued.
Morgera named the U.S., U.K., Australia, and Canada as wealthy nations where governments are still handing out billions of dollars in subsidies to fossil fuel companies each year—direct payments, tax breaks, and other financial support whose elimination could reduce worldwide fossil fuel emissions by 10% by 2030, according to the report.
"These countries are responsible for not having prevented the widespread human rights harm arising from climate change and other planetary crises we are facing—biodiversity loss, plastic pollution, and economic inequalities—caused by fossil fuels extraction, use, and waste," said Morgera.
She also pointed to the need to "defossilize knowledge" by holding accountable the companies that have spent decades denying their own scientists' knowledge that continuing to extract oil, coal, and gas would heat the planet and cause catastrophic sea-level rise, hurricanes, flooding, and dangerous extreme heat, among other weather disasters.
Defossilizing information systems, said Morgera, would mean protecting "human rights in the formation of public opinion and democratic debate from undue commercial influence" and correcting decades of "information distortions" that have arisen from the public's ongoing exposure to climate disinformation at the hands of fossil fuel giants, the corporate media, and climate-denying politicians.
Morgera said states should prohibit all fossil fuel industry lobbying, which companies like ExxonMobil and Chevron spent more than $153 million last year in the U.S. alone—with spending increasing each year since 2020, according to OpenSecrets.
"More recent research has documented climate obstruction—intentional delaying efforts, including through media ownership and influence, waged against efforts for effective climate action aligned with the current scientific consensus," wrote Morgera. "Fossil fuel companies' lobbyists have increased their influence in public policy spaces internationally... and at the national level, to limit regulations and enforcement. They have instilled doubt about the need to act on, and the viability of, renewables, and have promoted speculative or ineffective solutions that present additional lock-in risks and higher costs."
While a transition to a renewable energy-based economy has been portrayed by the fossil fuel industry and its supporters in government as "radical," such a transition "is now cheaper and safer for our economics and a healthier option for our societies," Morgera told The Guardian on Monday.
"The transition can also lead to significant savings of taxpayer money that is currently going into responding to climate change impacts, saving health costs, and also recouping lost tax revenue from fossil fuel companies," she said. "This could be the single most impactful health contribution we could ever make. The transition seems radical and unrealistic because fossil fuel companies have been so good at making it seem so."
In addition to lobbying bans, said Morgera, governments around the world must ban fossil fuel advertising and criminalize "misinformation and misrepresentation (greenwashing) by the fossil fuel industry" as well as media and advertising firms that have amplified the industry's disinformation and misinformation.
Several countries have taken steps toward meeting Morgera's far-reaching demands, with The Hague in the Netherlands introducing a municipal ordinance in 2023 banning fossil fuel ads, the Australian Green Party backing such a ban, and Western Australia implementing one.
The fossil fuel industry's "playbook of climate obstruction"—from lobbying at national policymaking summits like the annual U.N. Climate Change Conference to downplaying human rights impacts like destructive storms and emphasizing the role of fossil fuels in "economic growth"—has "undermined the protection of all human rights that are negatively impacted by climate change for over six decades," said Morgera.
Morgera pointed to three ways in which states' obligations under international humanitarian laws underpin the need for a fossil fuel phaseout by 2030:
- The survival of states that contributed minimally to climate change is impaired by loss of territory to sea-level rise and/or protracted unsafe climatic conditions;
- People are substantially deprived of their means of subsistence because of the severe deterioration of entire ecosystems due to climate change due to flooding, drought, and extreme heat; and
- The cultural survival of the populations of small island developing states, Indigenous peoples, people of African descent, peasants and small-scale fishers is impaired by loss of territories, protracted unsafe climatic conditions and/or severe ecosystem degradation.
Morgera's report was presented as more than a third of Tuvaluans applied for a visa to move to Australia under a new climate deal between the two countries, as the Pacific island is one of the most vulnerable places on Earth to rising sea levels and severe storms.
Morgera said that fossil fuel industry's impact on the human rights of people across the Global South—who have contributed little to the worsening of the climate emergency—"compels urgent defossilization of our whole economies, as part of a just, effective, and transformative transition."Keep ReadingShow Less
Big Polluters Dodged Their Duties at COP29; Will the ICJ Hold Them to Account?
Rich countries must pay up for the climate action needed to halt the climate crisis they have created and remedy the climate harms that they have inflicted.
Dec 13, 2024
The recent COP29 climate finance deal is a stark example of how wealthy historical emitters continue to evade their responsibilities to pay for climate action and remedy climate harm. But they cannot escape rising demands for accountability. In the historic hearings on states' climate obligations at the International Court of Justice, which are drawing to a close, developing nations are forcing them to face the law.
The timing of these ICJ hearings, on the heels of yet another failure of the United Nations climate talks, underscores what's at stake.
The headlines have called COP29's climate finance deal a triumph of diplomacy, but this could not be farther from the truth. Wealthy nations responsible for the majority of cumulative greenhouse gas (GHG) emissions have carefully engineered an escape from their climate obligations through a deal the terms of which are too loose, and that offers too little, too late.
We know rich countries can deliver the grants they owe to the Global South. They can raise well over $5 trillion a year by ending fossil fuel handouts, taxing the rich, and changing unfair global financial rules.
It's too loose: Despite the deal's reference to two finance figures, $1.3 trillion and $300 billion, both constitute a hollow promise. The text fails to hold developed countries to their legal duty to provide climate finance to the Global South. Actors are merely "called upon" to work toward scaling funding to $1.3 trillion per year by 2035, without any binding commitments. Even the $300 billion annual goal has been carefully worded to avoid any concrete obligations. Developed countries are only required to "take the lead" in "mobilizing" these funds, which can come from private finance, multilateral development banks, and other "alternative" sources.
As multiple states including Colombia, Sierra Leone, and Seychelles emphasized during the ICJ hearings, this vagueness disproportionately impacts debt-stressed nations already struggling to fund climate action. If rich countries can pass the buck to the private sector and Global South, the most climate-vulnerable nations may be forced to take on more loans and private investment schemes rather than grants, deepening the historic debt crisis already affecting 93% of them.
Private finance cannot cover the costs of climate action in the Global South. That approach has been tested and failed. Nor can carbon markets fill the gap. Yet, the deal leaves the door open to carbon finance being wrongly counted as climate finance, allowing polluters to claim other countries' climate action as their own through carbon offsets rather than requiring them to pay up and phase out fossil fuels at home. With under 16% of carbon credits currently achieving actual emission reductions, this doesn't underwrite climate ambition, it undermines it.
It's too little: Contrary to what UNFCCC lead Simon Stiell has suggested, what was agreed at COP29 is not a tripling of climate finance. When adjusted for inflation, the $300 billion target is no meaningful increase compared to the $100 billion annually promised by 2020—which rich countries failed to meet. As the decision's own preamble acknowledges, the scale of need in developing countries is on the order of trillions, not billions, annually for climate action between now and 2030. And that figure is neither unreasonable nor out of reach. For context, rich nations currently spend $378 billion yearly on fossil fuel subsidies alone, and fossil fuel companies raked in an average of over $1 trillion in annual profits over the last 10 years. The money exists—it's just being invested in climate destruction rather than climate action.
It's too late: Waiting until 2035 for full implementation of climate finance goals essentially writes off this critical decade for climate action.
The inadequacy of this climate finance deal means planning for failure when it comes to fossil fuel phaseout, and therefore locking in climate catastrophe. The necessary global transition away from fossil fuels can't happen at the speed and scale required unless the biggest polluters pay. The ink has barely dried on the agreement, and wealthy nations are already on the offense. E.U. Climate Commissioner Woebke Hoekstra suggested in De Telegraaf that the E.U. could reduce its share of climate finance contributions since "other country contributions count too." Meanwhile, U.K. Energy Secretary Ed Miliband reframed the entire deal as an "investment opportunity," suggesting that private sector funding could cover the bill—precisely the kind of responsibility-shifting the agreement's language enables. Hoekstra celebrates the deal as 'the start of a new era for climate finance'. Sadly, this is true. A new era where the E.U., U.K., and other rich nations dodge their responsibility to pay—one where everyone is responsible and thus no one is.
But we know rich countries can deliver the grants they owe to the Global South. They can raise well over $5 trillion a year by ending fossil fuel handouts, taxing the rich, and changing unfair global financial rules.
We also know failing to provide needed climate finance doesn't just condemn Global South countries suffering most acutely from a crisis they didn't create. It undermines our collective future.
As the International Court of Justice deliberates on states' climate obligations, this inadequate finance deal illustrates exactly why judicial scrutiny and legal clarity is needed. The world cannot afford another decade of wealthy nations dodging their responsibilities while climate disasters mount.
We reject this deal for what it is—a carefully constructed escape hatch for wealthy nations. It's high time for the biggest polluters to stop hiding behind voluntary pledges and using the climate regime to protect themselves from climate accountability, rather than to protect people and the planet from climate destruction. Rich countries must pay up for the climate action needed to halt the climate crisis they have created and remedy the climate harms that they have inflicted. Doing so is not just a moral imperative, it's a legal obligation.
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Trump Win Fulfills Oligarchy's 50-Year Plan for Right-Wing Takeover
The billionaires have won. They have successfully killed the American Dream. And now we have to fight back.
Nov 06, 2024
When plunder becomes a way of life for a group of men in a society, over the course of time they create for themselves a legal system that authorizes it and a moral code that glorifies it.” — Frédéric Bastiat, Economic sophisms, 2nd series (1848)
We just watched the final fulfillment of a 50 year plan. Louis Powell laid it out in 1971, and every step along the way Republicans have follow it.
It was a plan to turn America over to the richest men and the largest corporations. It was a plan to replace democracy with oligarchy. A large handful of America’s richest people invested billions in this plan, and its tax breaks and fossil fuel subsidies have made them trillions. More will soon come to them.
As any advertising executive can tell you, with enough money and enough advertising — particularly if you are willing to lie — you can sell anybody pretty much anything.
This is not the end... hitting bottom often begins the process of renewal.
Even a convicted felon, rapist, and friend and agent of America’s enemies.
America was overwhelmed this fall by billions of dollars in often dishonest advertising, made possible by five corrupt Republicans on the Supreme Court, and it worked. Democrats were massively outspent, not to mention the power of the billionaire Murdoch family’s Fox “News” and 1500 hate talk radio stations.
Open the lens a bit larger, and we find that it goes way beyond just this election; virtually every crisis America is facing right now is either caused or exacerbated by the corruption of big money authorized by five corrupt Republicans on our Supreme Court.
They are responsible for our crises of gun violence, the drug epidemic, homelessness, political gridlock, our slow response to the climate emergency, a looming crisis for Social Security and Medicare, the situation on our southern border, even the lack of affordable drugs, insurance, and healthcare.
All track back to a handful of Supreme Court justices who’ve sold their votes to billionaires in exchange for extravagant vacations, luxury yachts and motorhomes, private jet travel, speaking fees, homes, tuition, and participation in exclusive clubs and billionaire networks that bar the rest of us from entry.
For over two decades, Clarence Thomas and his wife have been accepting millions in free luxury vacations, tuition for their adopted son, a home for his mother, private jet and megayacht travel, and entrance to rarified clubs.
Sam Alito is also on the gravy train, and there are questions about how Brett Kavanaugh managed to pay off his credit cards and gambling debts. John Roberts’ wife has made over $10 million from law firms with business before the court; Neil Gorsuch got a sweetheart real estate deal; Amy Coney Barrett refuses to recuse herself from cases involving her father’s oil company.
None of this is illegal because when five corrupt Republicans on the Court legalized members of Congress taking bribes they legalized that same behavior for themselves.
As a result, we have oligarchs running our media, social media, and buying our elections, while the Supreme Court, with Citizens United, even legalized foreign interference in our political process.
Our modern era of big money controlling government began in the decade after Richard Nixon put Lewis Powell — the tobacco lawyer who wrote the infamous 1971 “Powell Memo” outlining how billionaires and corporations could take over America — on the Supreme Court in 1972.
In the 1976 Buckley v. Valeo decision, the Court ruled that money used to buy elections wasn’t just cash: they claimed it’s also “free speech” protected by the First Amendment that guarantees your right to speak out on political issues.
In the 200 preceding years — all the way back to the American Revolution of 1776 — no politician or credible political scientist had ever proposed that spending billions to buy votes with dishonest advertising was anything other than simple corruption.
The “originalists” on the Supreme Court, however, claimed to be channeling the Founders of this nation, particularly those who wrote the Declaration of Independence and the Constitution, when they said that “money is the same thing as free speech.” In that claim, Republicans on the Court were lying through their teeth.
In a letter to Samuel Kercheval in 1816, President and author of the Declaration of Independence Thomas Jefferson explicitly laid it out:
“Those seeking profits, were they given total freedom, would not be the ones to trust to keep government pure and our rights secure. Indeed, it has always been those seeking wealth who were the source of corruption in government.”
But Republicans on the Supreme Court weren’t reading the Founders. They were instead listening to the billionaires who helped get them on the Court in the first place. Who had bribed them with position and power and then kept them in their thrall with luxury vacations, “friendship,” and gifts.
Two years after the 1976 Buckley decision, the Republicans on the Supreme Court struck again, this time adding that the “money is speech and can be used to buy votes and politicians” argument applied to corporate “persons” as well as to billionaires. Lewis Powell himself wrote the majority opinion in the 1978 Boston v Bellotti decision.
Justices White, Brennan, and Marshall dissented:
“The special status of corporations has placed them in a position to control vast amounts of economic power which may, if not regulated, dominate not only our economy but the very heart of our democracy, the electoral process.”
But the dissenters lost the vote, and political corruption of everything from local elections to the Supreme Court itself was now virtually assured.
Notice that ruling came down just two years before the Reagan Revolution, when almost all forward progress in America came to a screeching halt.
It’s no coincidence.
And it’s gotten worse since then, with the Court doubling down in 2010 with Citizens United, overturning hundreds of state and federal “good government” laws dating all the way back to the late 1800s.
Thus, today America has a severe problem of big money controlling our political system. And last night it hit its peak, putting an open fascist in charge of our government.
No other developed country in the world has this problem, which is why every other developed country has a national healthcare system, free or near-free college, and strong unions that maintain a healthy middle class. It’s why they can afford pharmaceuticals, are taking active steps to stop climate change, and don’t fear being shot when they go to school, the theater, or shopping.
It’s why they are still functioning democracies.
The ability of America to move forward on any of these issues is, for now, paralyzed with the election of Trump and the GOP taking over the Senate.
This is not the end, though; hitting bottom often begins the process of renewal.
Many Americans will continue to speak out and fight for a democracy uncorrupted by the morbidly rich.
And so will I.
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Report Details Record-Breaking Health Threats of Climate Crisis, Fossil Fuel Subsidies
"No individual or economy on the planet is immune from the health threats of climate change," said a lead researcher.
Oct 30, 2024
Over $1 trillion spent each year on subsidizing fossil fuel production must be redirected to public health efforts, said the experts behind a new annual report monitoring progress on the climate and global health.
The 2024 Report of the Lancet Countdown on Health and Climate Change, published Tuesday in The Lancet by the Lancet Countdown at Universiy College London (UCL), found that delayed action on the climate emergency is exposing people across the globe to record-breaking threats, with 10 of 15 indicators showing that specific health threats have reached "concerning new levels."
"This year's stocktake of the imminent health threats of climate inaction reveals the most concerning findings yet in our eight years of monitoring," said Marina Romanello, executive director of the Lancet Countdown and a senior research fellow at UCL. "Once again, last year broke climate change records—with extreme heatwaves, deadly weather events, and devastating wildfires affecting people around the world."
With 2023 named the hottest year on record earlier this year by the European Union's Copernicus Climate Change Service, the researchers behind the new report found that the average person experienced an additional 50 days of dangerously hot weather that would not have happened without fossil fuel extraction heating the planet.
Heat-related deaths among people over age 65 reached the highest level ever recorded, 167% higher than in the 1990s and more than double the 65% increase that was expected if temperatures hadn't changed since then.
An additional 151 million people across 124 countries experienced moderate or severe food insecurity last year, an increase that was associated with extreme drought that affected almost half of global land area.
"We must cure the sickness of climate inaction—by slashing emissions, protecting people from climate extremes, and ending our fossil fuel addiction."
Changing climate conditions across the globe and the flooding that has come with more frequent hurricanes and tropical storms are also fueling a rise in the transmission of infectious diseases like dengue fever, according to the Lancet Countdown, and warmer coastal waters contributed a record-high number of cases of the bacterial infection vibriosis last year.
"The mosquitoes that spread infections like dengue fever epidemics are reaching new countries, and gradually moving north," said Anthony Costello, a professor at UCL Institute for Global Health and co-chair of the countdown.
But despite those indicators and others, said Romanello, "we see financial resources continue to be invested in the very things that undermine our health."
Researchers expressed optimism about rising investments in renewable energy, but warned that new fossil fuel investment accounted for more than a third of new energy spending in 2023, and 84% of world governments continue to subsidize fossil fuel production despite clear warnings from scientists that oil and gas extraction have no place on a pathway to limiting planetary heating to 1.5°C.
Governments are "in effect paying an estimated $1.4 trillion dollars per year to worsen the crisis," reported The Hill.
Meanwhile, "only 68% of countries reported high-to-very-high implementation of the legally mandated capacities to manage health emergencies in 2023," according to the Lancet Countdown. Just 35% of countries reported having early warning healthcare systems for heat-related illness.
"No individual or economy on the planet is immune from the health threats of climate change," said Romanello. "The relentless expansion of fossil fuels and record-breaking greenhouse gas emissions compounds these dangerous health impacts and is threatening to reverse the limited progress made so far and put a healthy future further out of reach."
Total carbon emissions from fossil fuel combustion reached nearly 40 gigatonnes last year, a 1.1% increase from 2022, contributing to high levels of air pollution as well as changing climate conditions.
"National-level net subsidies exceeded 10% of national health spending in 55% of the countries, and 100% in 27% of them," reads a visual summary of the report. "These funds could be redirected towards supporting the transition to clean energy sources, protect vulnerable populations from soaring climate change risks, and enable a healthy future."
Redirecting fossil fuel subsidies "would provide the opportunity to deliver a fair, equitable transition to clean energy and energy efficiency, and a healthier future, ultimately benefiting the global economy," said Romanello.
Released less than two weeks before world governments are set to convene in Azerbaijan for the United Nations Climate Change Conference (COP29), where climate finance is expected to be a key issue, the report calls for "new strategies and finance for implementation" in order to protect global public health from climate disasters.
"These must acknowledge climate change's effects on health and related systems, assess risks and vulnerabilities, and incorporate resilience to shocks," reads a joint brief by the Lancet Countdown and Médecins Sans Frontières, also called Doctors Without Borders. "Adequate, predictable, and unified climate finance for adaptation and technical support is urgently needed to enable ministries of health and their implementing partners to adopt forward-thinking strategies, integrate anticipatory actions, and enhance flexibility and agility in their operating models."
U.N. Secretary-General António Guterres said the report shows "we must cure the sickness of climate inaction—by slashing emissions, protecting people from climate extremes, and ending our fossil fuel addiction—to create a fairer, safer, and healthier future for all."
To shift resources toward a "zero-emissions future," said Costello, "people's health must be put front and center of climate change policy to ensure the funding mechanisms protect well-being, reduce health inequities and maximize health gains, especially for the countries and communities that need it most."
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Scientists, Experts Demand 'Immediate End' to EU Fossil Fuel Subsidies
"E.U. leaders must make a choice: Stand with the people and the planet, or continue propping up an economy that's driving us towards climate catastrophe," said one advocate.
Oct 02, 2024
Warning that policymakers in the European Union are undermining the bloc's own climate goals by continuing to subsidize fossil fuel extraction, climate scientists and other experts from across Europe were among the signatories of an open letter released Wednesday, demanding that officials redirect hundreds of billions of dollars in subsidies to "turbocharge climate solutions."
The coalition United for Climate Justice spearheaded the letter, which comes ahead of a planned march in Brussels on Saturday, October 5.
"These subsidies go against Europe's plans for a sustainable and just transition and fuel the devastating heatwaves we have seen this past summer in our continent," reads the letter. "Europe is now the fastest warming continent; we have reached a turning point and cannot afford to delay any further."
Groups including Extinction Rebellion, 350.org, and Greenpeace E.U. pointed to goals the bloc has set in recent years, including the 8th Environmental Action Program, which entered into force in 2022 and included a commitment to "phasing out fossil fuel subsidies."
The subsidies, which were estimated at more than €400 billion ($441 billion) in 2023, also stand in the way of meeting climate targets put forward in the European Green Deal, said the signatories. The plan aims to make Europe "the first climate-neutral continent," with no net emissions of greenhouse gases by 2050 and "interim targets of reducing greenhouse gas emissions by 55% by 2030 and by 90% by 2040," notes the letter.
"This will not happen without an immediate phaseout of fossil fuel subsidies," said the groups bluntly, "as a step towards a fossil-free Europe."
By continuing to subsidize fossil fuel projects, they added, the E.U. is also flouting its own Parliament's declaration of a climate emergency in 2019.
To act in line with the declaration and its climate commitments, said the groups, the E.U. must:
- Set a timeline for the phaseout of fossil fuel subsidies by 2025, providing technical and financial assistance to member states
facing challenges in meeting phaseout deadlines and offer incentives for achieving milestones ahead of schedule; - Adopt comprehensive methodological guidance for member states that accurately and transparently accounts for both explicit and implicit subsidies associated with fossil fuels; and
- Develop a binding framework to monitor and report on member states' progress towards phasing out fossil fuel subsidies, with noncomplying members facing consequences such as financial penalties and reduced access to E.U. funding.
The bloc's fossil fuel subsidies "distort energy demand, perpetuate dependence on polluting energy sources, and undermine European energy security, while subsidizing industries that contribute significantly to greenhouse gas emissions," said the groups.
Phasing out the subsidies would "future-proof the European economy, reducing climate-related financial risks," they added.
The letter comes weeks after Storm Boris dumped record-breaking rains on European countries including Romania, Austria, and Poland, leading to deadly flooding.
"The E.U. cannot claim leadership on climate action while continuing to support polluting industries with billions," said Angela Huston Gold, spokesperson for United for Climate Justice. "E.U. leaders must make a choice: Stand with the people and the planet, or continue propping up an economy that's driving us towards climate catastrophe. The recent disastrous floods in Central and Eastern Europe are yet another wake-up call. We must end our fossil fuel dependency and therefore eliminate all fossil fuel subsidies."
Also last month, the Portuguese government declared a "state of calamity" over wildfires that killed at least seven people. Last year, the World Meteorological Organization (WMO) and the E.U.'s Copernicus Climate Change Service (C3S) determined the Europe is the fastest-warming continent.
"Year after year, commitments have been made and left unfulfilled, and we can no longer accept inaction," said the signatories of Wednesday's letter, who also included Luca Mercalli, president of the Italian Meteorological Society, and Paul Stubbs of the Institute of Economics in Croatia. "Until these necessary changes occur, people will continue to take to the streets to make our voices heard and hold you accountable."
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Ending Oil Subsidies, Taxing the Rich Could Help Free Up $5 Trillion a Year for Climate
"The real question isn't whether we can afford to act, but whether we can afford not to."
Sep 24, 2024
Research published Tuesday estimates that rich countries could mobilize over $5 trillion a year for climate action worldwide by cutting off subsidies to the oil and gas industry, imposing a levy on big polluters, and cracking down on tax evasion by large corporations and the rich.
The new report from Oil Change International (OCI) was released as world leaders gathered in New York City for high-level United Nations General Assembly talks, a meeting that comes less than two months before the COP29 climate summit in Azerbaijan.
OCI's research, which includes a fact sheet outlining various proposals to raise funds for climate action, stresses that "there is no shortage of public money available for rich countries to pay their fair share on fair terms for climate action at home and abroad."
"The urgency and extent of growing economic inequality, unfair sovereign debt crises, climate disasters, and fossil fuel profits have created significant momentum towards many of these measures in international and domestic policy spheres," OCI's research brief notes. "Finance has been in the spotlight in most major international political fora in the past few years in recognition that our current financial architecture is a major driver of these overlapping crises."
Among the proposals laid out in OCI's brief are an equitable end to "public finance, direct subsidies, and state-owned company investments in fossil fuels," which could raise $846 billion a year globally; a "climate damages tax" on fossil fuel extraction, which could raise $618 billion a year; a 25% minimum corporate tax rate, which could raise $479 billion annually; and a wealth tax on billionaires, which could raise roughly $2.60 trillion a year in the Global North and over $5.6 trillion worldwide.
Laurie van der Burg, OCI's public finance lead, said that the rich nations most responsible for the climate emergency "owe this money to Global South countries that have not caused this crisis and need fair finance to deliver strong climate plans next year that phase out fossil fuels."
"This is essential to avoid climate breakdown and save lives," she added.
The clock is ticking ⏰ Rich nations must deliver a roadmap for at least $1 TRILLION/year by 2025. No more empty promises. It's time to pay up for a just transition! 💚
Read the full report: https://t.co/eKwm0zXits pic.twitter.com/4qjTO5JQ8c
— Oil Change International (@PriceofOil) September 24, 2024
The COP29 climate summit will take place a year after nations agreed at COP28 to transition "away from fossil fuels in energy systems" in a "just, orderly, and equitable manner."
The success of that pledge, OCI said, depends on rich nations contributing massively to global climate finance after years of falling short of their pledges and continuing to expand fossil fuel extraction and handouts. Worldwide, environmentally harmful subsidies—including fossil fuel subsidies—have surged to $2.6 trillion a year, according to a report released last week.
"Global North countries have a responsibility to redirect their share of these subsidies in support of climate action," OCI said Tuesday.
The new report comes on the heels of a record-hot summer and amid devastating extreme weather, from massive flooding across Europe and Africa to wildfires in South America.
Andreas Sieber, associate director of policy and campaigns at 350.org, said Tuesday that "the real question isn't whether we can afford to act, but whether we can afford not to."
"It is a bitter irony that rich nations hide behind claims of fiscal restraint, yet trillions are still spent on fossil fuel subsidies and militarization," said Sieber. "The truth is simple: the money exists, but the political will does not. By treating climate finance as a zero-sum game, wealthy countries not only deepen global inequality but also undermine their own futures."
"The energy transition isn't charity—it's an investment in global stability and security," Sieber added. "Ignoring the need for support only worsens the climate crisis, which knows no borders."
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'Colossal Waste': US Leads Way in Public Spending on False Climate Solutions
"The fossil fuel industry delays climate action, distracts from real solutions that would end the fossil fuel era, and does everything in its power to squeeze the last drops of profit from a dying industry, at the expense of all of us."
Aug 29, 2024
Among the world's wealthiest countries, the U.S. leads the way in spending public money on so-called climate "solutions" that have been proven to "consistently fail, overspend, or underperform," according to an analysis released Thursday by the research and advocacy group Oil Change International.
The group's report, titled Funding Failure, focuses on international spending on carbon capture and fossil-based hydrogen subsidies, which continues despite ample data showing that the technological fixes have "failed to make a dent in carbon emissions" after 50 years of research and development.
The report details how five countries account for 95% of all carbon capture spending, with the U.S. investing the most taxpayer money in the technology, at $12 billion in subsidies over the last 40 years.
Norway comes in second with $6 billion going to carbon capture and storage, while Canada has spent $3.8 billion, the European Union has spent $3.6 billion, and the Netherlands has poured $2.6 billion into the technology, with which carbon dioxide emissions are compressed and utilized or stored underground.
"It is nothing short of a travesty that funds meant to combat climate change are instead bolstering the very industries driving it."
Harjeet Singh, global engagement director for the Fossil Fuel Non-Proliferation Treaty Initiative, told The Guardian that the subsidies amount to a "colossal waste of money."
"It is nothing short of a travesty that funds meant to combat climate change are instead bolstering the very industries driving it," said Singh.
While proponents claim carbon capture and storage reduces planet-heating carbon emissions, OCI notes, it was originally developed in the 1970s "to enhance oil production, and this remains its primary use," with the technology "barely" reducing emissions.
High-profile carbon capture failures in the U.S. include the Petra Nova project in Houston, Texas, which cost nearly $200 million in taxpayer funds and whose captured emissions were later used for crude oil production, and the FutureGen project, "which swallowed $200 million and never materialized."
"Investing in carbon capture delays the transition to renewable energy," reads OCI's report. "Instead of wasting time and money on technologies that do not work, governments must commit to justly and urgently phasing out fossil fuels before it's too late."
Despite the lack of data supporting the use of carbon capture, the group said, countries including the U.S. are "preparing to waste hundreds of billions of taxpayer dollars on these ineffective technologies, further benefiting the fossil fuel industry."
OCI highlighted how the U.S. and Canada, while ostensibly fighting the climate crisis, have spent a combined $4 billion in public money to explicitly "pay oil companies to produce more oil," with the subsidies going to carbon capture for "enhanced oil recovery."
The report also found that in addition to the $12 billion in taxpayer funds the U.S. has spent on carbon capture and fossil hydrogen—a leak-prone gas produced through energy-intensive processes that cause their own emissions—the government has spent an estimated $1.3 billion on the 45Q tax credit, which allows companies to write off tax for every ton of carbon dioxide they store underground.
The Inflation Reduction Act (IRA) increased the amount given to companies in 45Q tax credits from $35 to $60 per ton, meaning that the subsidy could grow to over $100 billion in the next 10 years.
OCI's Policy Tracker shows that overall public spending on carbon capture and hydrogen could grow by between $115 billion and $240 billion in the coming decades.
"We need real climate action, not fossil fuel bailouts!" said OCI in a post on social media.
The group's report also highlights that fossil fuel giants such as ExxonMobil have shifted from carbon capture skeptics to outspoken proponents of the technology—with the company bragging to investors that carbon capture and hydrogen would help its Low Carbon Business Unit make "hundreds of billions of dollars" and grow to be "larger than ExxonMobil's base business."
Exxon didn't launch its carbon capture efforts until 2018, having spent several years and hundreds of millions of dollars on another "climate solution" that ultimately failed: the use of algae to make biofuels.
Since then, Exxon has "pushed for direct government funding for carbon capture, particularly at the U.S. Department of Energy (DOE)," successfully lobbying for $12 billion allocated in the Bipartisan Infrastructure Bill in 2021 for "carbon management research, development, and demonstration."
Exxon also lobbied for the increased rate of the 45Q tax credit in the IRA and "played a 'central role' in drafting a 2019 DOE-sponsored report on carbon capture that determined Congress would need to create an incentive of around $90 to $110 per ton to support carbon capture deployment," according to OCI.
The Guardian on Thursday reported that Exxon still "chases billions in U.S. subsidies for a 'climate solution' that helps drill more oil," describing how the oil giant hosted an event at the Democratic National Convention earlier this month where senior climate strategy and technology director Vijay Swarup praised the IRA for helping Exxon pursue carbon capture and said: "We need new technology and we need policy to support that technology. We need governments working with private industry."
Exxon's enthusiasm for carbon capture, said OCI, is an example of how "the fossil fuel industry delays climate action, distracts from real solutions that would end the fossil fuel era, and does everything in its power to squeeze the last drops of profit from a dying industry, at the expense of all of us."
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