No Subsidies for Anybody

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DAILY ENERGY NEWS | 06/26/2025

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Just get rid of all subsidies.

Liberty Taxed (6/25/25) opinion: "The claim that fossil fuels are heavily subsidized simply doesn’t withstand scrutiny. While a few narrow subsidies exist and should be eliminated, the real outlier in the tax code isn’t fossil fuel subsidies but the scale of preferential treatment granted to renewable energy technologies. In 2022, fossil fuels (coal, natural gas, and petroleum liquids) received $3.2 billion in federal support (11 percent of the total), compared to nearly $15.6 billion for renewables and nuclear (54 percent). The subsidies are even smaller when scaled by the energy produced by each source. By this measure, renewables and nuclear are subsidized at a rate 19 times higher per unit of energy produced than coal, oil, and natural gas. Looking at renewables alone, the subsidy is 30 times larger than for fossil fuels. The tax code is where most federal energy spending happens. About 77 percent of all the EIA-tabulated subsidies come from tax provisions. The tax code provides 90 percent of the oil and gas subsidies and 98 percent for renewables. Most fossil-related tax expenditures are not subsidies in the traditional sense."

"Not only is the United States by far the largest producer of oil in the world today and by a factor of two, the biggest producer of natural gas in the world today, but we have a rational policy around energy."

– Energy Secretary Chris Wright

Too bad environmentalists have to play fairly now.

Law & Liberty (6/18/25) article: "In a ruling with sweeping implications for environmental law and infrastructure development, the US Supreme Court recently overturned a lower court decision that had halted the Uinta Basin Railway—a proposed rail line linking Utah’s oil-rich Uinta Basin to the national freight network. The high court’s decision not only revived a major energy project but also corrected a troubling trend: the misuse of the National Environmental Policy Act (NEPA) to obstruct economic development through ever-expanding regulatory demands. By overturning the DC Circuit, the high court affirmed that judges cannot impose open-ended environmental mandates beyond their statutory authority."

Solar was destined to fail since it's only viable with subsidies.

The Daily Economy (6/18/25) opinion: "One of the largest residential solar installers, Sunnova, went belly up on June 8. The company had over $10 billion in debt and a market cap of over a billion dollars less than a year ago. While aggressive spending on expansion and poor management account for some of Sunnova’s problems, they also faced significant policy headwinds: high interest rates, higher costs due to inflation, uncertainty and higher costs due to tariffs, and freezing of Inflation Reduction Act subsidies. Solar power (and wind power for that matter) has several major problems as a large-scale source of electricity for the grid. The most important problem is its intermittent nature. Solar panels don’t generate electricity at night. Nor do they generate much when it is cloudy. Furthermore, power generation is unreliable — it changes over seasons and can’t be dialed up or dialed down based on people’s demand for electricity — such as during severe weather events. The main way to deal with this problem entails massive energy storage (in effect, giant batteries) that are prohibitively expensive to build at scale."