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american petroleum institute
Big Oil Doesn't Just Want to Get Rich Wrecking the Climate—They Want Lower Taxes Too
"If this polluter handout is snuck into the GOP tax bill, then cuts to Medicaid and food stamps could well pay for another giveaway to Big Oil," said the co-author of a new report. "That's obscene."
Mar 24, 2025
Having helped install the most fossil fuel-friendly administration of the climate awareness era, Big Oil and their Republican boosters in Congress are now setting their sights on undermining a tax enacted by during the tenure of former President Joe Biden as part of the landmark Inflation Reduction Act.
Alan Zibel, research director at the consumer advocacy watchdog Public Citizen, and Lukas Shankar-Ross, deputy director of Friends of the Earth's Climate and Energy Justice Program, noted in a report published Monday that Sen. James Lankford (R-Okla.), who chairs the Senate Ethics Committee, earlier this year introduced industry-backed legislation, the Promoting Domestic Energy Production Act, for possible inclusion in Republicans' proposed $4.5 trillion tax giveaway to corporations and the ultrawealthy.
As Common Dreamsreported in January, the fossil fuel industry spent an estimated $445 million during the 2024 election cycle to elect President Donald Trump and other GOP candidates who serve their climate-wrecking interests, and it expects much in return.
"Domestic oil and gas companies, including from Lankford's home state of Oklahoma, have warned their investors about the corporate alternative minimum tax," Zibel and Shankar-Ross wrote. "The industry could soon be rewarded with specially tailored tax relief courtesy of their Republican political allies."
As the report explains:
Here's how the tax scheme works: In August 2022, President Joe Biden signed the Inflation Reduction Act, which made historic climate investments. To help pay for new spending, the bill included a set of corporate tax increases, the largest of which was the $222 billion corporate alternative minimum tax. This tax is meant to prevent corporations that deliver massive profits to investors from paying nothing or nearly nothing in taxes because of corporate-friendly tax loopholes. Under the corporate minimum tax, if a company reports an average of at least $1 billion in annual income over three years, then it must pay 15% of that reported income in taxes, minus certain deductions.
The report highlights Republican efforts to eliminate the minimum tax, including via legislation introduced by Sen. John Barrasso (R-Wyo.) and endorsed by the American Petroleum Institute, U.S. Chamber of Commerce, National Association of Manufacturers, National Mining Association, Western Energy Alliance, and industry lobbyists.
The bill introduced by Lankford would enable fossil fuel companies to skirt the minimum tax by allowing them to deduct "intangible" drilling costs, a tactic used as an effective subsidy for more than 120 years. Zibel and Shankar-Ross described the tax dodge as "the oldest and the largest fossil fuel subsidy on the books," and one which "allows all of the costs for drilling an oil or gas well to be deducted immediately in the year they are incurred."
"If individual taxpayers understood the magnitude of the extreme subsidies for Big Oil, they would be shocked."
"It is simply outrageous that the GOP is using its trifecta to create yet another fossil fuel subsidy," Shankar-Ross said in a statement, referring to Republicans' control of the White House and both chambers of Congress. "If this polluter handout is snuck into the GOP tax bill, then cuts to Medicaid and food stamps could well pay for another giveaway to Big Oil. That's obscene."
Zibel asserted that "oil and gas companies are using the political influence they purchased to dodge paying even a minimal part of their fair share."
"If individual taxpayers understood the magnitude of the extreme subsidies for Big Oil, they would be shocked," he added. "The newest effort to bypass even the most modest of tax bills by the industry is shocking, but sadly not surprising."
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The Killer CEOs of Big Oil
Their fortunes are the result of poisoning you, me, our children and grandchildren, every other living thing on Earth, and destroying the temperature stability of our atmosphere. This week it's horrifying to look out and see the world they are creating for the rest of us.
Jan 11, 2025
Public Citizen would like you to know that there are killers among us.
They wear $2,000 suits and travel in private jets, unbothered by the TSA or the teeming masses. Their children attend the finest universities in the world, and they vacation on private islands and yachts. Many “earn” more in a day than most Americans take home in a year; their positions ensure their heirs will never have to work a day in their lives.
Their fortunes are the result of poisoning you, me, our children and grandchildren, every other living thing on Earth, and destroying the temperature stability of our atmosphere. This week they’re arguably responsible, in part, for billions of dollars in losses, numerous deaths, and thousands of shattered lives in Southern California.
Illegitimate president-elect Trump is trying his best to cover for them, claiming that the fires ripping through the Los Angeles area are the fault of California’s Democratic governor, calling Gavin Newsome by a childish name to draw more attention to Trump’s efforts on behalf of the Republican Party’s most generous donors.
Oil industry executives and fossil fuel billionaires are the hands holding the smoking gun of climate change that have directly or indirectly caused tens of thousands of deaths and millions of people displaced worldwide over the past two decades. And now the fires in southern California.
Mainstream media is largely going along with Trump’s charade, choosing not to even mention — in the vast majority of their reports on the crisis — the role of climate change in the fires. And never, G-d forbid, mentioning the role of the fossil fuel industry in the climate change that has turned these fires from an annual nuisance into a hellscape.
It’s as frankly absurd as a TV news person reporting on a plane crash and, instead of asking aviation experts what caused it, simply lifting their collective shoulders with a helpless “shit happens” shrug.
But these fires — and the droughts and changing weather patterns that made them so severe — aren’t something that just happens by random happenstance, any more than an airliner crash.
And the oil industry has known for decades this day was coming.
In November, 1959, the famous scientist Edward Teller — the “Father of the H-Bomb” — was the keynote speaker at a conference on “The Energy of the Future” in New York, organized by the American Petroleum Institute and the Columbia Graduate School of Business. The news he conveyed to the assembled oil industry executives was stark:
“Whenever you burn conventional fuel, you create carbon dioxide. ... The carbon dioxide is invisible, it is transparent, you can’t smell it, it is not dangerous to health, so why should one worry about it? Carbon dioxide has a strange property. It transmits visible light but it absorbs the infrared radiation which is emitted from the earth. Its presence in the atmosphere causes a greenhouse effect ...
“It has been calculated that a temperature rise corresponding to a 10 per cent increase in carbon dioxide will be sufficient to melt the icecap and submerge New York. All the coastal cities would be covered, and since a considerable percentage of the human race lives in coastal regions, I think that this chemical contamination is more serious than most people tend to believe.”
This shocking news apparently provoked a scramble in the oil industry, probably similar to when the asbestos industry learned in the 1930s that their product caused lung cancer (the mesothelioma that killed my father), or in 1939 when the tobacco industry learned that smoking also killed people.
They set out to determine if Teller’s prediction was true. He’d predicted that CO2 levels would reach the point where they’d begin to seriously melt the polar and Greenland ice caps and alter weather patterns within a few decades, telling the oil executives at that 1959 meeting:
“At present the carbon dioxide in the atmosphere has risen by 2 per cent over normal. By 1970, it will be perhaps 4 per cent, by 1980, 8 per cent, by 1990, 16 per cent [about 360 parts per million, by Teller’s accounting], if we keep on with our exponential rise in the use of purely conventional fuels. By that time, there will be a serious additional impediment for the [heat] radiation leaving the earth.”
For the next decade, industry scientists went to work along with studies commissioned by major universities. One of the most well-known was a 1968 report the American Petroleum Institute hired the Stanford Research Institute to conduct. Its findings corroborated Teller’s prediction:
“Significant temperature changes are almost certain to occur by the year 2000, and these could bring about climatic changes. ... there seems to be no doubt that the potential damage to our environment could be severe. ... pollutants which we generally ignore because they have little local effect, CO2 and submicron particles, may be the cause of serious world-wide environmental changes.”
It was the first of dozens of studies the industry paid for or knew about, all predicting pretty much exactly what’s happening right now in Los Angeles, including major reports in 1979, 1982, and 1991.
And then the “climate denial” began.
Fossil fuel billionaires and their oil companies funded think tanks to promote skepticism, pushed frontmen onto radio and TV to claim that climate scientists and people like Al Gore were “in it for the money,” and began funding the campaigns of politicians willing to exchange the future habitability of the planet for a few decades of power and wealth.
In 2015, the Union of Concerned Scientists documented decades of internal industry memos and strategy sessions that were organizing, funding, and detailing roughly three decades of lies foisted on the American Public. The industry and its executives’ efforts were all, apparently, in the service of preserving their income stream and avoiding any liability for the deaths they knew would one day come as a result of their product poisoning our atmosphere.
And now that day is here. Oil industry executives and fossil fuel billionaires are the hands holding the smoking gun of climate change that have directly or indirectly caused tens of thousands of deaths and millions of people displaced worldwide over the past two decades. And now the fires in southern California.
Two-thirds of voters, according to a 2024 poll, believe the fossil fuel industry and its pampered executives should be held civilly responsible for the damage climate change is causing, and a plurality want them to face criminal charges.
Public Citizen published a 2023 report titled “Charging Big Oil with Climate Homicide,” including legal rationales and possible strategies for holding the killers in suits accountable by state and local prosecutors.
Will Los Angeles District Attorney Nathan Hochman or California Attorney General Rob Bonta have the courage to hold these companies and/or their executives accountable for the lies and deceptions they’ve funded that this week are killing Angelinos?
Will enough people call their members of Congress at 202-224-3121 to provoke investigations that could lead to congressional action?
Will our media ever begin to call out Trump and the alleged climate lies and deceptions of the industry that owns him?
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Vermont Sued for New Law Requiring Big Oil to Pay for Climate Damage
'For too long, giant fossil fuel companies have knowingly lit the match of climate disruption'
Jan 05, 2025
The US Chamber of Commerce and the American Petroleum Institute - representing the biggest fossil fuel companies in the world - are suing the State of Vermont over its new law requiring fossil fuel companies to pay a share of the state's damage caused by climate change.
The lawsuit, filed last Monday in the US District Court for the District of Vermont, asks a state court to prevent Vermont from enforcing the law passed last year. Vermont became the first state in the country to enact the law after it suffered over $1 billion in damages from catastrophic summer flooding and other extreme weather.
Vermont’s Attorney General’s Office said as of Friday, Jan. 3, they had not been served with the lawsuit.
The lawsuit argues that the U.S. Constitution precludes the act and that the federal Clean Air Act preempts state law. It also claims that the law violates domestic and foreign commerce clauses by discriminating “against the important interest of other states by targeting large energy companies located outside of Vermont.”
The Chamber and the American Petroleum Institute argue that the federal government is already addressing climate change. Because greenhouse gases come from billions of individual sources, they claim it has been impossible to measure “accurately and fairly” the impact of emissions from a particular entity in a specific location over decades.
“For too long, giant fossil fuel companies have knowingly lit the match of climate disruption without being required to do a thing to put out the fire,” Paul Burns, executive director of the Vermont Public Interest Research Group, said in a statement. “Finally, maybe for the first time anywhere, Vermont is going to hold the companies most responsible for climate-driven floods, fires and heat waves financially accountable for a fair share of the damages they’ve caused.”
The complaint is an essential legal test as more states consider holding fossil fuels liable for expensive global warming-intensified events like floods, fires, and more. Maryland and Massachusetts are among the states expected to pursue similar legislation, modeled after the federal law known as Superfund, in 2025.
New York Gov. Kathy Hochul (D) signed a similar climate bill into law - the Climate Change Superfund Act- on Dec. 26, pointing to the need to fund climate adaptation projects.
Downtown Montpelier, Vermont was under water on Monday, July 10, 2023 caused by the flooding of the Winooski River.
(Photo: John Tully for The Washington Post via Getty Images)
Heavy Rains Cause Catastrophic Flooding In Southern Vermont
(Photo by Scott Eisen/Getty Images)
Flooding is seen in downtown Montpelier, Vermont
(Photo: John Tully for The Washington Post via Getty Images)
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