“Oil Companies Don’t Get Subsidies”?

In early July while campaigning in Plymouth, Scott Brown declared that “oil companies don’t get subsidies.”

Here’s SJSF’s response, op-ed style:

President Obama, Congressional leaders, and over a million leaders have called for an end to fossil fuel subsidies, yet just last week in Plymouth, Scott Brown was caught on camera declaring that “oil companies do not get subsidies.”

What’s going on? A simple linguistic trick —the word “subsidies” refers to direct grants alone, which oil companies do not technically receive (though coal companies do). But this is a pointless distinction—whether one calls them “subsidies” or “tax policy”, the US government still spends $11 billion each year on tax exemptions and other special financing for fossil fuel corporations. The revenue foregone by exempting fossil fuel companies from their fair share of taxes has to be made up somewhere—ultimately, the taxpayer foots the bill.

Federal support of an industry through tax breaks can make sense when assisting the industry advances the public good. However, it is unclear how American lives are bettered by fossil fuel tax exemptions.

The policy is an unambiguous economic loss for consumers. In 2009, economists Stephen Brown and Maura Allaire published a study detailing the economic impacts of removing fossil fuel “tax preferences”, the roughly $5.5 billion in tax reductions provided annually to the fossil fuel industry but not other similar industries. They show that the policy decreases energy prices between $2.29 and $6.60 per person each year—but the average taxpayer dishes out $16.13 for this price reduction. In other words, we pay a dollar and only get back 41 cents. Clearly, these favoritist tax policies burden the average American consumer with an extra expense rather than any savings.

Since average Americans lose money from this policy, Senator Brown must have other motivations for supporting it. But his support can’t arise from concern about his constituents’ health and lives—fossil fuel pollution leads to high rates of asthma and cancer and even in this moment, lives are being lost from extreme weather events exacerbated by climate change, a direct result of fossil fuel combustion. His support can’t be an effort to create jobs—economists at the University of Massachusetts at Amherst have found that investments in fossil fuel energy create far fewer jobs than equal investments in safe renewable energy, energy efficiency, or mass transit. It can’t be for national security—rising food prices caused by climate change is increasing political instability around the world in unpredictable ways, and the impact on our oil security was found by Allaire and Brown to be merely “slight” (the profits of fossil fuel companies are already so gigantic that $11 billion in tax exemptions is too little to truly affect their operations).

Given these many compelling reasons to stop giving his constituents’ tax dollars to fossil fuel corporations, why does Senator Brown continue to vote to uphold the policies? For several months now, students from across Massachusetts have been attempting to find out. Staff from Senator Brown’s Boston office tell us that they don’t know the reasoning behind his policy. His D.C. office has not responded to us or to the many inquiries sent by the Boston staff on our behalf. Their impenetrable silence leaves us to search outside the earnest assumption that our elected representatives only strive to act in the public interest.

We don’t have to look far. In return for Senator Brown’s gift of our tax dollars, the fossil fuel industry fills his campaign coffers. The scale of this is extraordinary. In the past two years, Senator Brown has received $289,960 directly from the fossil fuel industry, five times as much money as Senator Kerry has taken from fossil fuel companies in the past thirteen years. Senator Brown’s voting record clearly indicates the value of the fossil fuel industry’s investment– votes to gut the Clean Air Act and release industrial toxins into our communities, votes to prevent action on climate change, and, of course, repeated votes to continue giving our money to the fossil fuel companies who finance his campaigns. Clearly, the deadly energy industry doesn’t just destroy our health and communities—they’ve destroyed Senator Brown’s independence as well.

If “he’s for us”, as his campaign slogan says, why doesn’t he act for us rather than his donors?