why am I NOT suprised

Big oil have very powerful lobbies. Even when they make $$$B a year in profit they want more subsidies and tax breaks. They are addicted to gifts for governments.

It is time to electrify all transportation means and use all those Oil subsidies to transition away from ICE vehicles.

Corn based ethanol subsidies should also be phased out because it is not a sustainable source of replacement energy. Edible grains should be used as food not as feed for gas guzzling ICE oversized inefficient monsters.

ai_vin:

Aren't you exagerating a bit? I doubt if gas would go up by a single dollar if all those subsidies were removed. One more dollar per gallon could be very positive to accellerate the transition to electrified vehicles.

Why are we subsiding something that has been profitable for centuries?

The outline sounds rather objective although there is no doubt where the ELI stands. The report might be worth reading in detail.

The Foreign Tax Credit is not as simple as one might wish. It isn't easy to tax fuel and energy production activities done overseas in sovereign nations. And if you try the corporate forms will be modified to evade your efforts.

US recyclable producers would be getting tax credits if they did their work overseas. But recyclable fuel -mostly ethanol- is a domestic industry protected by tariff. The tariff is a subsidy, whether it is considered in the report isn't mentioned.

And alternative energies such as wind and solar and geothermal are domestic almost by definition. At least with our present technology.

I would prefer that they would keep hydropower out of these studies as they exclude nuclear. Hydropower produces a lot of electricity. But it is the outputs of the growing alternatives we really are interested in.

In the US hydropower is old, the big dams were built decades ago and there will be little added hydropower in the future. Others will differ but I would remove it from studies.

"Yes and then most Americans couldn't afford to get to work."

There are these things called "electric cars". They were invented 100 years ago. If gasoline never even existed then the R&D efforts would have instead been devoted to developing them rather than ICE's. Then today, we'd instead all be able to buy electric cars with 1000 km range for $18,000, paying $20 a month to charge them, and we'd all be better off for it. It's interesting how a supply of relatively cheap, but unsustainable and environmentally destructive, energy source can destroy a nation. I guess it's like heroine. You get addicted to it and think it's good for you but in short order it will kill you.

Ben wrote "Why are we subsiding something that has been profitable for centuries?"

Why? Because the purpose of government has always been to enrich the oligarchy at the expense of the poor. The modern form of which is to enrich mega-corporations and the small group of people who often run them into the ground - but get rich doing so.

A larger group that gamed the system was the pirates - just as long as the thievery occured elsewhere, and some payment was made to the host government. The modern form of which is small business, who rob their suppliers, customers and employees, and then go bust - but not before paying some taxes.

Imagine what science could have done with photovoltaics and batteries with three trillion dollars in subsidies. Imagine what people could do with their hard earned money if only they weren't robbed of it.

"its also funny how people think switching from one fossil fuel (gasoline powered ICEs) to another less efficient one (i.e. electricity from coal power plants) is better for the environment."

Step one is the electrification of the drivetrain. It is impossible to get an environmentally sustainable method of propulsion using the ICE as the energy conversion device. Theoretically, biofuels could be sustainable but we all know how that works out.

Step 2, after transportation is electrified, is to produce that electricity sustainably. Options are: wind, wave, tidal, hydro, geothermal, yes even nuclear, and most significantly, solar.

There are hundreds of millions of buildings in North America with roofs on them that aren't doing anything useful. These could be covered with solar panels and at 15% efficiency they would provide about 15% of our TOTAL energy use from all sources. If they were 25% efficient, that is 25% of total energy use.

Also of interest is that if solar panels were incorporated into the bodywork of your car you could drive 10 km a day for free in the sun, using today's commercially available solar panels. Assuming future innovations in panel technology bring affordable ones up to 50% efficient, you're looking at like 30 km or more per day of free driving.

The funny / sad part about this is that in the absence of oil all this technology would have developed 50 years ago and we wouldn't be in any of our current mess.

This study doesn't include the $30 to $70 billion dollars spent-- annually-- by the US military to protect the Persian Gulf oil routes!

I am quite certain that "big oil" would give up any modest subsidy, if the government would remove the tremendous tax burden. Federal and State governments get a higher percentage of the profits from a gallon of gas than do the oil companies by far. I doubt any industry pays more in taxes than the oil industry. They pay income tax and then have an additional tax placed on their product at the pump. If "big oil" is subsidized, then why do we worry about how to replace lost gas tax revenue when cars go electric.

Only in the land of the looney left can companies that are net tax payers (by huge margins) be accused of being subsidized, while people who don't pay any taxes are always clamoring for their next stimulus check, or "refundable tax credit"

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And, similar to this example, some people actually WANT our corrupt, incompetent, federal government to ration health care based on campaign contributions. What a bunch of mind-numbed dolts they are!

Praise be to Algore!!!

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ai_win:

A + $1/gal would put about $146 B/year into Big Oil coffers. I doubt if more subsidies would be required. At + $10/gal they could buy the whole continent in a few years.

"Yes and then most Americans couldn't afford to get to work."
In 2007, gasoline was around $10/g in Europe and they were still driving 100mph on the Autobahn.

The charts should show the fossil fuel inputs to ethanol and solar as negative. The main point is that most of the oil profits go out of the country and are earned by speculators not even many of the oil producers.

It is true that oil pumped in the US earns a big profit for local owner when the price is high so there is no reason to use it until the world price goes higher. Rising oil prices do not stimulate local production much except by small producers who need money. Large integrated oil companies can bring in foreign oil and sell at high prices to force the world market to go to higher prices and withold their own local oil.

Everybody in the US would eat the last Mountain sheep in the world if they had gone without food for a week.

Local production of coal is the only industry which has saved the US economy from total collapse, but nuclear power plants support this to the tune of %20.

All the solar electricity and all the wind electricity and all the geothermal electricity and all the corn ethanol does not even contribute ten percent of nuclear electricity's CO2 savings and it will never be able to do it at an affordable expense. ..HG..