US subsidizes oil and gas so investors never lose
grist.orgThis article and those like it ignore the actual reason for these subsidies, war time. Until our tanks and jets don't run on oil, we'll subsidize oil.
We're not going to make the economy green by increasing the price of oil. It has to be done by making green energy cheaper or capable of replacing oil in military contexts.
Or we could recognize that there is no good reason for the U.S. to have a military so giant that it requires massive, counterproductive subsidies to maintain “just in-case” we need to engage in a massive war.
The U.S. military maintained and fueled-up all of those tanks and jets for 20 years in Afghanistan and accomplished nothing. Why should the world’s climate continue to suffer for stuff like that?
What is more important, climate change or the fuel supply of tanks?
>The U.S. military maintained and fueled-up all of those tanks and jets for 20 years in Afghanistan and accomplished nothing.
The subsidies aren't protection against this scale of military action. It's a protection against a real war where the enemy has the ability to cut off our international supply lines or where are suppliers themselves are the enemy. This is the exact reason we subsidize corn farms.
It's very analogous to the PPE shortage we just had in the US because we outsourced all of our manufacturing to countries that took first dibs before exporting.
>What is more important, climate change or the fuel supply of tanks?
To the existence of the US government, tanks and airplanes are a more immediate need.
> there is no good reason for the U.S. to maintain such a military so giant that it requires massive, counterproductive subsidies to maintain just in-case we need to engage in a massive war.
Investing in the military is nothing like buying more computing capacity on AWS. It's not as flexible as you imagine it to be. By the time war begins, it can be too late. Afghanistan may have been a mistake but other wars were not.
Additionally, federal defense spending as a share of GDP has fallen gradually since WWII and the Cold War. The past couple decades have been our lowest levels since the 1930s.
Finally, if you were to make substantial cuts to our military, the world and our adversaries would take notice, and we don't want the consequences of that. It's hard to grasp how much of the world's geopolitics is altered by that defense budget the American public views as 'going to waste.'
> By the time war begins, it can be too late.
What war? The U.S. is invulnerable to invasion. The only conflicts that the U.S. would possibly need such a massive global military for would be foreign wars to maintain its world dominance (e.g. containing China, proxy wars, etc.), which I contend are pointless and destructive. I disagree with your implicit premise that the U.S. has to be the global hegemon - it does not have to be, especially when the most urgent geopolitical issue is climate change. Who is “top dog” and how their military is going to fuel their tanks doesn’t matter when the entire world is facing environmental catastrophe.
I’m glad our spending levels are apparently as low as they’ve been since the 1930s, but I’m not sure how that is relevant to the U.S. military’s fuel usage and carbon emissions, which are almost certainly higher than in the 1930s.
> the world and our adversaries would take notice, and we don't want the consequences of that
The consequences being, I assume, the end of U.S. hegemony?
>What war? The U.S. is invulnerable to invasion.
The Titanic is unsinkable!
>The only conflicts that the U.S. would possibly need such a massive global military for would be foreign wars to maintain its world dominance (e.g. containing China, proxy wars, etc.), which I contend are pointless and destructive.
Pointless and destructive won't stop them.
>I disagree with your implicit premise that the U.S. has to be the global hegemon
It doesn't have to be but someone will take it's place and they'll do so with all the same fossil fuel powered war machine because that's the best way to maintain power.
>Who is “top dog” and how their military is going to fuel their tanks doesn’t matter when the entire world is facing environmental catastrophe.
You're letting perfect be the enemy of good. There is nothing that the US (or anyone) can do to stop the manufacture and usage of the most advanced weapons of war available which have a massive carbon footprint.
The sooner you come to the conclusion that _somebody_ is going to do it the sooner you can ask the real question of who would you rather it be.
> The Titanic is unsinkable!
This doesn’t engage with my point. How many nations with nuclear arsenals and a large ocean on either side have been invaded? It isn’t a likely occurrence, and definitely not one worth subsidizing the war industries for decades in preparation for. It makes no strategic sense for another nation to attempt. Why pretend this is the reason we are doing all of this?
> Pointless and destructive won't stop them.
We agree here. My point is that what they are doing is bad, not that they won’t do it anyway. Of course the U.S. military will continue to try and keep the U.S. hegemony alive and continue expending precious resources to do so.
> There is nothing that the US (or anyone) can do to stop the manufacture and usage of the most advanced weapons of war available which have a massive carbon footprint.
I disagree. The U.S. is one of the largest manufacturers and exporters of military equipment, including jets and tanks. If we stopped making and selling them, we could make an impact on emissions. Sure, other people would likely increase their production, but that doesn’t mean the U.S. has to contribute or provide its technical expertise/resources.
> The sooner you come to the conclusion that _somebody_ is going to do it the sooner you can ask the real question of who would you rather it be.
I think this is a weak argument. This is a lot like the Onceler’s line from the Lorax: “If I didn’t do it then someone else would!”, which may be true, but does not mean you have to continue the current path. The U.S. military could commit to ending its foreign wars and reducing its emissions massively if it wanted to, but it does not.
Could you cite a source please?
I'm not sure that I buy that. Cost is no object, the govt can afford to buy fuel if it needs it.
I'm not sure I can but it seems tautological. If the US is at war with the country that supplies us oil, I doubt any amount of money is going to get them to sell it.
Conversely, any country we import oil from during war time becomes a target to the supply line.
The US is a net exporter of oil and gets over half of it's imported oil from Canada.
https://www.eia.gov/energyexplained/oil-and-petroleum-produc...
https://www.eia.gov/energyexplained/oil-and-petroleum-produc...
Just ignore the 287 million car owners in the US... yeah.
I wouldn't vote for a party that promised to raise gas prices to 8 dollars a gallon - I don't think most people would.
I’d be inclined to vote for a policy to do that and give $100 (or thereabouts) to every adult citizen every month. (Or maybe every adult permanent resident.)
The first "subsidy" that they name is the accounting concept of depreciation. I stopped reading at that point.
The article is a little unclear, but I don’t think that is true. It sounds like the subsidy is that they are allowed to do depreciation in a nonstandard way, so that it benefits them.
No mention of the externalities that the oil industry benefits from - well reclaimation, carbon emissions... It is impossible to have a proper discussion about the oil industry if so many fundamental long term costs are ignored in the public discourse.