It is a myth that only alternatives or greens are subsidized. In fact the petroleum industry has been subsidized to the tune of trillions of dollars over the years.
All oil refineries and pipelines were built with large subsidies, earmarks, and tax breaks. Of course we spend billions to keep the sea lanes open for tankers and protect them from terrorist and pirate attacks.
Gas stations are often subsidized by local government when they are built, as are most commercial buildings in America.
These subsidies come in many forms, and are often more or less hidden from us taxpayers, such as, but by no means limited to; no or low interest loans, loans with no expectation of payback, earmarks, grants, tax breaks, free land, public employees working for private companies and a hundred other creative ways to support and enable private development. These subsidies are often buried in unrelated legislation or not even officially acknowledged or recognized, say a public works engineer or perhaps laborers on unofficial loan to a private construction project.
George Soros is getting a two billion dollar subsidy from the US for oil drilling in Brazil. Payback is unlikely, in my opinion, tho a big chunk will surely end up in Democratic election coffers.
http://online.wsj.com/article/SB10001424052970203863204574346610120524166.html
Not all subsidies are government, many foundations, charities, and corporations subsidize economic development of every sort imaginable.
You can not get away from subsidies in America. It is politically popular among us conservatives to attack ethanol subsidies while we ignore and even deny petroleum subsidies.
We can not even ban public subsidies, earmarks, and tax breaks, as they are so deeply embedded in every level of government; national, state, county, city and township. With millions of pages of code to search, and every effort taken to conceal many of them, it is impossible to even roughly quantify them.
larry: My main problem with “green energy” is that it isn’t all that “green” and is being sold as the safe, clean, and easy alternative to nuclear, coal and petroleum. A point that I make is that if we are going to subsidize something, it should be coal power - - old coal plants are very dirty, new ones are much, much cleaner, we have the coal and nearly all of the necessary infrastructure here already, and by encouraging the building of high-tech coal plants in return for conversion or decommissioning of old ones we make far more and far faster progress in reducing emissions of all kinds.
In fact the petroleum industry has been subsidized to the tune of trillions of dollars over the years.Hmmm ... at odds with published reports.
The EIA estimate of energy subsidies for 1999 provides the foundations for much of this study’s analysis. Total energy subsidies in 1999 were somewhere between $8.6 billion and $11.3 billion and included tax expenditures, direct expenditures, excise taxes, and R&D expenditures.pa390.pdfThe oil industry received a subsidy of approximately $567 million, a tiny fraction of the total sum of energy subsidy and a far smaller sum than other energy industries received from the federal government.