Let me put it simply: the continued existence of oil subsidies amounts to one of the most obvious and enduring failures of American democracy.Hyperbole isn’t my thing. But I’ll stand by that sentence—no matter how closely it may resemble some sophomoric screed plucked from the annals of high school newspaperdom—until Congress figures out how to stop funneling billions of taxpayer dollars into oil industry coffers every year.Here is why: Nobody likes oil subsidies. Nobody except for oil companies and their immediate and indirect beneficiaries.The oil industry is home to the most profitable companies in the world, companies that make record profits when prices soar at the pump. Together the big five companies — BP, Chevron, ConocoPhillips, ExxonMobil, and Shell — earned a total of $33.5 billion, or $368 million every day, during the first three months of 2012, even as oil production declined. That’s on top of a combined record profit in 2011 of $137 billion. On average, during the first quarter of 2012, oil CEO compensation grew by a shocking 55 percent.And yet these companies receive between $10-40 billion dollars a year in tax breaks and direct subsidies (A recent report by Double Bottom Line Venture Capital says that the industry has reaped an average annual subsidy of $4.86 billion since subsidies began in the U.S. in 1918; by comparison, the nuclear energy industry gets around $3.5 billion per year.)And this is how it’s been for decades upon decades. Some subsidies were originally designed to help oil companies recover the costs for exploration and recovery, others to help them write off taxes they pay for doing business in other countries.Read the rest over at Motherboard.
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