hartmann report: "Why are Americans Subsidizing Our Own Extinction?" [View all]

[orleans]

"To stop our climate-change-driven suicide, Congress must stop allowing oil exports, end subsidies to the fossil fuel industry, and promote clean American energy"
by Thom Hartmann
https://hartmannreport.com/p/why-are-americans-subsidizing-our

(worth reading)
here's a snippet:

Each American — man, woman and child — paid around $2000 last year to subsidize the fossil fuel industry, according to an analysis this year by the International Monetary Fund (IMF).

~~snip~~

It costs, in 2022 dollars, an average of $23 a barrel to produce oil in the US from existing wells and $48 a barrel from new wells (which includes all the costs of ramping up to production).

So why isn’t oil in the US selling for, say, $50 or $60 a barrel, where oil companies could make a sweet profit and gas prices would float around $2.50 a gallon?

It goes back to a massive and expensive lobbying effort by Big Oil in 2015: a handful of fossil-fuel-owned Democrats joined the entire bought-off GOP in pushing legislation through Congress that reversed President Ford’s 1975 ban on exporting American oil. President Obama, over the loud objections of most Democrats, signed the legislation on December 18th of that year.