A reminder that the federal government still showers the fossil fuel industry with money and favorable tax regulations in almost every form imaginable. * Name-

A reminder that the federal government still showers the fossil fuel industry with money and favorable tax regulations in almost every form imaginable. * Name-your-price expenses for drilling costs * Superfund-cleanup-excise-tax exemptions for crude extracted from certain kinds of fields * A tax rate of 21% thanks to the Tax Cuts and Jobs Act (it was 35%) * Explicit subsidies * Underpricing the environmental, health, and economic damage/expenses/losses caused by fossil fuel burning (versus renewable energy) * Near-freezing of sales taxes on fossil fuels, resulting in them falling dramatically when adjusted for inflation despite growing evidence of how widespread their harm is, and obvious growing costs from their continued use In 2021, the federal government gave the coal industry alone half a billion dollars in "R&D" funding. Meanwhile there's a myth that we need all this for "energy independence." We've gone well beyond "energy independence" to "fourth largest exporter of oil" and "#1 in oil extraction in the world." We extract twice as much oil as the Saudis. One of the reasons "green" tech was so expensive for so long: the massive handouts being given to the fossil fuel industry. The next time you're filling up your gas tank and grumbling about high gas prices, think about how they receive at least twenty billion dollars a year from the feds - not counting state and local stuff. Only in the last 2-3 years has funding for renewable energy technology started to approach that being given the (heavily established, dominating) fossil fuel industry. What's wild is that despite those huge handouts for fossil fuel industries, solar and wind dropped below fossil fuel costs (per GWhr) well before the funding increase, and have continued to drop. Don't even get me started on the handouts the nuclear (fission) industry gets, including free training for thousands of nuclear plant techs thanks to the navy...while the cost of nuclear power has only gone up despite being only a decade or two shy of a century worth of development.