Oil and gas: Over 13 times more subsidies than renewables

By Zachary Shahan on 6 August 2012

CleanTechnica

You know the line — “Renewable energy shouldn’t receive government support. If it can’t stand on its own in the free market, it doesn’t deserve to grow.” The answer — total freakin’ hogwash, horsefeathers, balderdash!

First of all, as you might have gathered from the title, fossil fuel’s historical subsidies are like skyscrapers next to single-family-renewable-energy-subsidy homes. This is, notably, without including the massive indirect subsidies the oil and gas industry receive in unchecked externalities that wreak havoc on our health, our quality of life, and the potential viability of the human species after climate change is done with us.

You can see in this chart below that historical oil and gas subsidies are over 13 times larger than renewable energy (not including biofuels) subsidies:

Over the first 15 years of these energy sources’ subsidies, oil and gas got 5 times what renewables got (in 2010 dollars) and nuclear energy got 10 times as much.

“Nuclear spent an average of about $3.3 billion a year, oil and gas about $1.8 billion, and renewable energy just under half a billion,” DBL Investors Managing Partner Nancy Pfund and Ben Healey recently wrote in “What would Jefferson do?”