As we all know, if there’s one thing Republicans care about, it’s protecting the Free Market. They may not have actually read “The Wealth of Nations,” but they know it says there’s nothing more sacred than the Free Market. And if you ever doubted the Republican love of the Free Market, a new report has found that Trump’s economic law will give the oil and gas industry an additional $40 billion in new subsidies, Wired reports.
That $40 billion won’t be paid out all at once, though. Instead, it works out to about $4 billion a year for the next decade. That’s, of course, on top of the $30.8 billion in subsidies the oil and gas industry already receives. It’s also “the largest single-year increase in subsidies we’ve seen in many years—at least since 2017,” Collin Rees, the US program manager for Oil Change International, a pro-environmental organization, and the author of the report, told Wired.
That said, the recently passed Republican law may be even more beneficial to the oil and gas industry than the $4 billion that Oil Change International tallied up, with Rees telling Wired that figure is “likely to be an undercount.” As he put it, “There’s probably some things that we missed—some corners of the budget that are funding fossil fuels in different ways.” So the $34.8 billion the oil and gas industry gets every year is probably just a baseline, and it also doesn’t include local and state subsidies that would inflate that figure even further.
Republicans love subsidies
So, where did those billions come from, mere months after Elon insisted he went to Washington to cut waste? The biggest change is related to a process known as carbon capture, which involves pulling CO2 from the environment and storing it underground. But it can also be used to tap into difficult-to-reach reserves and improve oil production, as the University of Texas Geosciences department explains here. Under the Biden Administration’s Inflation Reduction Act, oil and gas companies got more money for CO2 storage that wasn’t related to oil production, but under the new Republican bill, they both count equally, giving the oil and gas industry an extra $1.4 billion per year to pump more oil. From Wired:
“It’s no secret that Trump and the Republicans are on the side of the fossil fuel industry and very much vice versa,” says Rees. “The fossil fuel industry spent hundreds of millions of dollars getting Republicans and Trump elected. They then presented their wish lists. Nearly everything on those wish lists was fulfilled, and in fact, they got a bunch of additional goodies that weren’t even in those wish lists.”
The oil and gas industry also benefits massively from not having to cover the damage its emissions do to people’s health, the environment and the planet overall. From lung issues caused by pollution to the damage caused by massive storms that have been supercharged by human-caused climate change, governments around the world are stuck picking up the bill for problems created by the oil and gas industry. Per a 2021 paper published in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences and cited by Wired, that adds up to an additional $62 billion in subsidies for the oil and gas industry every year.
And that, my friends, is just how the Free Market works.
