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Meredith's avatar

After experiencing firsthand the infamous Texas Winter Storm in February and listening to the then-chair of ERCOT describe the disaster as 'our renewables let us down' ... I have thoughts. Behind the incredible deceit and fraud of OG toward their clients (oil & gas; is that the right abbreviation?) are businesses run much like those of our ex-president: poorly managed and failures without heavy financial gov't. [citizen] propping up. These companies knew about climate change and its implications decades ago and had all that time -- grifting and being subsidized along the way -- to re-tool their businesses to achieve success under the actual environmental, social, and political conditions we now confront. They chose overwhelmingly not to do so and now are whining about not-fair and job-losses and so on. I have zero sympathy. I suppose it's not too late for them to figure out how to get in on renewable energy and make their participation profitable as well as morally sound; but I'm not very hopeful they'll change course.

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Phil Huckelberry's avatar

Even these numbers are misleading. There are "direct" subsidies, "indirect" subsidies (which are apparently narrowly defined in terms of things like pricing problems), but then there are also "very indirect" subsidies at a much larger scale, right? Any time you build a road instead of public transit, is this being factored in as a very indirect fossil fuel subsidy? It's not directly measurable, but that's where I've always understood a tremendous amount of subsidization to be occurring.

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