The Trump administration is cutting every subsidy and tax rebate for clean energy under the Inflation Reduction Act passed by Congress and signed into law by President Biden in 2022. The Trump administration and the Republican Congress is also eliminating any other laws that promote the transition to clean energy that created hundreds of thousands of green jobs, many in red states.
At the same time, the Trump regime is doubling down on dirty energy, gutting regulations over the development of gas, oil and coal, which still receive billions of dollars a year in government subsidies despite the industry being among the most profitable on earth. Trump is also requiring that power plants using fossil fuels be kept in operation, even those that were slated to be shuttered because of their hazardous pollution or weren’t economically viable.
Between The Lines’ Melinda Tuhus spoke with Collin Rees, U.S. program manager with Oil Change International. Here he explains the state of play for both renewable energy sources and fossil fuels, and says there’s still time to head off these disastrous changes in the budget bill that passed the House by only one vote and is now being debated in the Senate.
COLLIN REES: What we’re seeing is Republicans and Donald Trump taking a sledgehammer to clean energy incentives that have reduced pollution, created hundreds of thousands of jobs and lowered electricity bills for working families. And they’re doing that all in order to attempt to justify gigantic tax breaks for the rich, for fossil fuel companies in particular, for the donors who put them in office. And for the wealthiest Americans.
The way they’re doing it I think is really insidious. We have a tax code that for far too long, for decades, even over a century in many cases, has been tilted toward propping up the fossil fuel industry toward boosting oil and gas profits, coal industry as well, although not as much these days, but our tax code is overwhelmingly incentivizing fossil fuel production already. That has been the case for a very long time and even something like the Inflation Reduction Act — which was an important step forward in terms of supporting clean energy, even in the Inflation Reduction Act — we saw tens of billions of dollars of new incentives for additional fossil fuel production.
Even in recent years, we’ve continued to add new fossil fuel subsidies, even as it’s incredibly clear that we can’t afford to produce or burn more fossil fuels to stay within our climate limits, let alone our sort of global commitments. There are approximately six to eight times more permanent tax breaks for fossil fuels than there are for renewable energy. And I would say despite that uncertainty, despite a lack of investment and despite the federal government’s priorities and investments being tilted toward fossil fuels even in the present moment, clean energy has still made enormous gains. There has been a huge growth in clean energy over the years and the Inflation Reduction Act was an important step. Continuing that growth, that is the way the entire world is growing.
There’s been the beginnings of an American industry built up around actually supporting clean energy. We’re seeing not only a continuation of all the existing fossil fuel tax breaks, but they’re also even thinking about new ways to give more handouts to polluters, new ways to further subsidize this industry. They’re talking about further lowering royalty rates, making it even easier for oil companies to drill and frack on our public lands, on our public waters. Some more complicated pieces like exempting oil and gas companies from even the corporate minimum tax rate, the absolute bare minimum that all corporations must pay in terms of taxes, which is already far too low. They’re talking about giving exemptions to that for just oil and gas companies. And this is happening at the same time that they’re attacking clean energy tax breaks. They’re removing some of the few that were already there and making it extraordinarily harder to build out renewable energy in many ways.
MELINDA TUHUS: So when you said this administration is taking a sledgehammer to the clean energy tax credits and all the things that made it possible to build out a lot of clean energy, is there anything left?
But we are in danger of causing the U.S. to fall even further behind, both in terms of the rest of the world in clean energy manufacturing and in terms of our climate targets. The transition is inevitable, but how that transition looks and how just it is for workers, for communities and for the climate is yet to be determined. So I think that’s really the terrain of struggle that we’re talking about here. It’s still going to be possible to put solar on your house, but it will be increasingly difficult for clean energy projects, for instance, to be built on federal lands if the Trump administration gets its way. So there are many different pieces of this, but right now the Trump administration is trying to close down a whole lot of those fronts and give even more back.
For more information, visit Oil Change International’s website at oilchange.org.
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