Of the top three purported oil subsidies in the link:
1) Foreign tax credit: everyone gets that to avoid double taxation.
3) Deduction of exploration costs: deduction of expenses is typical and again something everyone does when you're being taxed on profits. This is better understood as "the tax code explicitly recognizes this as an expense, just as it does for hiring workers or warehousing unsold inventory".
Would you mind articulating what you think the oil subsidies are? The alternative fuels subsidy (2) seems like a legit case but only gets you 14 of the 370 billion claimed.
(I get that there are environmental costs but that's not what people have in mind with the vague "oil subsidies" I keep hearing about.)
In the United States, the federal government has paid US$74 billion for energy subsidies to support R&D for nuclear power ($50 billion) and fossil fuels ($24 billion) from 1973 to 2003. During this same timeframe, renewable energy technologies and energy efficiency received a total of US$26 billion.
convincing of what? Someone said that renewables aren't viable because they are subsidized. I said that fossil fuels are also subsidized so that is an odd argument to make. I've shown that fossil fuels do get subsidies. I'm not sure what you are going on about.
You asserted that they get subsidies. The subsidies turned out to be largely a) (1) not double taxing them, and b) (3) a tax code clarification that exploration costs are valid expenses.
If you want to establish that oil gets subsidies, please be specific about what they are so that I can learn more about them and confirm it is not simply a case of "something everyone gets".
The thread started with you giving a link that I had to digest before realizing it didn't say what you claimed. Now you're giving another link to a less neutral source.
Suggestion: learn legit example of oil subsidies and describe them in your own words so that I can first vet whether that would count as a subsidy before reading further.
It did say what I claimed, fossil fuels are subsidized. You want to add a qualification that isolates special subsidies that the fossil fuel industry gets which aren't stanfard for all businesses. That's a useful distinction and my second link breaks down some of the specific subsidies. You can read it or not, it's up to you. I'm not your personal summarizer.
I'm confident tab intelligent people reading this will agree that the fossil fuel industry is subsidized.
Yes: when someone tells me X is subsidized, I expect to hear about something the X industry gets that others don't. Because that's what the term means.
It's not enough to tell me "X makers get to deduct expenses! Clutch the pearls!"
In addition to the explicit subsidies mentioned in the sibling comment, also keep in mind the implicit subsidies of allowing people to pollute without paying the costs. Environmental regulations have diminished this substantially, but it's still pretty big. Pollution amounts to a subsidy of billions of dollars a year for fossil fuels, only we pay with our lungs instead of our wallets.
And in addition to the externalities that are not borne by the producers, how bout factoring in the portion of the US military budget that is devoted to ensuring access to oil around the world?
I'm not sure about counting that. My guess is that even if we were fully energy independent somehow, we'd still have an equally large military budget and probably find some other excuse for having various "adventures" in remote parts of the world.
