Comment: Texas paying the price for handouts to oil, gas industry

By Mark Gongloff / Bloomberg Opinion

Texas is one of the nation’s leading providers of welfare for the fossil-fuel industry. The trade-off is rising physical risk and economic hardship for all the rest of us; especially Texans.

By now we know a changing climate played at least a small role in the devastating July 4 floods in central Texas that killed at least 119 people. We also know that burning fossil fuels is the primary source of the greenhouse gases cooking the climate and making such disasters more likely and destructive. And we know Texas leads the nation in producing those fossil fuels.

What’s maybe not as well known is that the Lone Star State keeps that industry well fed with big helpings of taxpayer cash. Along with billions of dollars in explicit and implicit federal subsidies, the industry also receives at least 20 different tax and regulatory breaks and direct handouts from the state, according to a report last year by the nonprofit National Resources Defense Council. The dollar amounts are difficult to pin down, but just three of those tax breaks give the industry at least $1 billion a year alone, according to the NRDC. Subsidies for liquefied natural gas exporters amount to billions more, according to a Sierra Club report in December.

To its credit, Texas has also subsidized renewables such as wind and solar, fostering a nation-leading renewable-energy boom. But state politicians have made it their business to undermine these fossil-fuel competitors at every turn by kicking away their supports while further coddling oil and gas in what my colleague Liam Denning has described as a form of socialism.

https://www.heraldnet.com/opinion/comment-texas-paying-the-price-for-handouts-to-oil-gas-industry/