Will taxpayers bear the cost of cleaning up America’s abandoned oil wells?

Policy experts warn new proposals to plug abandoned oil and gas wells amount to huge subsidy for the fossil fuel industry

Oil and gas companies have a century-old bad habit of drilling wells and ditching them. And while Congress finally has a plan to plug some abandoned wells, new proposals effectively pass the fossil fuel industry's cleanup costs on to taxpayers and may even enable more drilling.

Concerned parties seem to agree on the scale of the crisis: millions of wells sit untended across the US, leaking toxins that pose public health problems along with the potent greenhouse gas methane, which contributes to the climate emergency.