America spends over $20bn per year on fossil fuel subsidies. Abolish them | Dana Nuccitelli

While we need to leave fossil fuels in the ground, America is giving the fossil fuel industry billions to extract more

Imagine that instead of taxing cigarettes, America subsidized the tobacco industry in order to make each pack of smokes cheaper.

A report from Oil Change International (OCI) investigated American energy industry subsidies and found that in 2015-2016, the federal government provided $14.7bn per year to the oil, gas, and coal industries, on top of $5.8bn of state-level incentives (globally, the figure is around $500bn). And the report only accounted for production subsidies, excluding consumption subsidies (support to consumers to lower the cost of fossil fuel use - another $14.5bn annually) as well as the costs of carbon and other fossil fuel pollutants.