Appearing on CNN’s State of the Union, American Petroleum Institute lobbyist Marty Durbin claimed “there are no loopholes” for the massively profitable oil industry. CNN’s Candy Crowley asked the lobbyist, after showing one of API’s ads that claim that removing oil subsidies would kill jobs, how the industry can tell Americans to suffer massive cuts while the top five oil companies have already made $100 billion in profits this year on high gas prices. Durbin said that Crowley just got her facts wrong:

CROWLEY: Six big oil companies piled up $36 billion maybe be profits at the end of this year $100 billion. Can you see how people go we need to help the oil industry?

DURBIN: Part of problem is that the facts aren’t out there. There are no loopholes. These are basic tax deductions that every industry is allowed to use.

Watch it:

In fact, there are tens of billions of dollars of special tax breaks and programs that are special to the fossil fuel industry. Here is a short list of such loopholes, with their ten-year cost on the federal budget:

$12.6 billion in percentage depletion for oil and natural gas wells and hard mineral fossil fuels
$12.9 billion in expensing of intangible drilling costs for oil and gas and expensing of exploration and development costs for coal
$18.7 billion domestic manufacturing deduction for oil, gas, and coal production
$0.4 billion in capital gains treatment for coal royalties
$0.2 billion exemption to the passive loss limitation for working interests in oil and natural gas properties
$0.1 billion deduction for tertiary injectants
$2.5 billion in federal tax subsidies to coal companies
$1.3 billion tax credit for refineries
$9.5 billion in royalty-free oil and gas leases

The big oil lobbyist is partly telling the truth, however. There are massive tax loopholes that are also used by other industries in addition to big oil, although they especially advantage the oil industry:

$52 billion in “last in, first out” accounting for inventories, a tax credit that disproportionately helps the oil and gas industry
$10.5 billion dual capacity tax credit, which also largely benefits oil and gas companies

Federal tax policy and programs subsidize the oil industry in other ways that add up to billions of dollars of taxpayer money a year, from oil defense to oil spill liability caps. The biggest oil loophole may be the free pollution of greenhouse gases that have an estimated cost to society of $100 a ton. The American Petroleum Institute is willing to spend millions running ads on CNN and sponsoring its presidential debates.

Marty Durbin is Sen. Dick Durbin’s (D-IL) nephew. Sen. Durbin has called for the end to oil subsidies worth $4 billion a year.

The more we learn about the Keystone XL tar sands pipeline, the wiser the decision to cancel it becomes.

I agree with the statement by the Center for American Progress (where I’m a senior fellow) that Obama should reject the permit because:

It is not in the national interest, nor is it in humanity’s interest.

I agree with our top climatologist, James Hansen, that “Exploitation of tar sands would make it implausible to stabilize climate and avoid disastrous global climate impacts.”  Though just to be clear, avoiding full exploitation of the tar sands is a necessary — but not anywhere near sufficient –  condition for avoiding catastrophic climate change, as Hansen himself has made clear.

X-axis is the range of potential resource in billions of barrels. Y-axis is grams of Carbon per MegaJoule of final fuel.

The Canadian tar sands are substantially dirtier than conventional oil as the chart above shows (longer analysis here).  They may contain enough carbon-intensive fuel to make stabilizing atmospheric concentrations of carbon dioxide at non-catastrophic levels all but impossible.  I’ll repost Real Climate’s analysis on this subject below.

I am not impressed by the argument of Michael Levi of the Council on Foreign Relations:

Slash oil demand and oil sands development goes away; keep oil demand on its current trajectory and we’ve got huge climate problems regardless of whether Keystone XL is approved.

That argument cleverly allows one to argue against the impact of any individual carbon-intensive action.

But both governing and morality are about choices.  Obama can’t slash oil demand by himself (though he is certainly aggressively pursuing fuel efficiency).  He can stop this pipeline.  The “everybody is doing it” argument is morally indefensible and precisely why we humanity is headed over a cliff with our foot on the accelerator of the fossil-fuel engine.

UPDATE:  Levi has replied to this post with an analogy that simply makes no sense and misses the entire point of the previous paragraph.  You can’t eliminate the moral consequences of any decision simply by saying that it would be a better idea to focus one’s efforts on (seemingly) more consequential decisions.  I’ll explain this at greater length on Monday.

By the way, Memo to all: They ain’t “oil sands.” I can understand why greenwashing Canadian promoters of turning tar into oil use the phrase rather than the traditional term “tar sands” (see “Canada tries to tar-sandbag Obama on climate“), but not why the U.S. media does, and certainly not why Obama does.

No doubt the phrase makes it seem like, oh, I don’t know, maybe up through the sand came a bubblin crude, oil that is, black gold, Texas tea, Athabasca euphemism (see ClimateProgress commenter, Jim Eager, here).  I digress.

The Canadian Prime Minister Stephen Harper called a decision to approve Keystone a “complete no-brainer.”  I could not agree more.  See Turns out humans are not like slowly boiling frogs … we are like slowly boiling brainless frogs, since “frogs will indeed remain in slowly heated water, but only if their brain is removed.”

The only “benefit” of  constructing a pipeline is a few thousand mostly temporary jobs, as the WashPost makes clear today.  Republicans attack Obama’s stimulus for creating only temporary jobs, but how they love it when the fossil fuel industry does it.

TP Green has a good chart from Cornell showing  the minimal job benefit in its post “Fact Check: Keystone XL Tar Sands Pipeline Isn’t A Job Creator“:

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UPDATE:  The director responds to comments here.

JR:  Right now, the global economy is a Ponzi scheme.  We created a way of raising standards of living we can’t possibly pass on to our children.  As Tom Friedman reported in 2009, “We have been getting rich by depleting all our natural stocks — water, hydrocarbons, forests, rivers, fish and arable land — and not by generating renewable flows.”

It has to collapse, unless adults stand up now and say, “This is a Ponzi scheme. We have not generated real wealth, and we are destroying a livable climate.”  Real wealth is something you can pass on in a way that others can enjoy.”  I’ve also noted that the 1% can insulate themselves from the collapse far longer than everyone else, with their gated and moated communities, multiple homes in multiple climates, security guards, private jets and general insensitivity to the price of anything — and hence insensitivity to the value of everything.

by Cole Mellino

The new documentary film GrowthBusters had its world premiere in Washington, DC last night. And Climate Progress had a chance to catch up with Director Dave Gardner to chat about why he made the movie.

Gardner, like so many Americans, grew up hooked on growth. He once had a successful career as a corporate film producer, putting together promotional videos for large companies. But his newest film rails against many of those corporations that are trying to keep us addicted to growth.

First, here’s the trailer to the film:

GrowthBusters: Hooked on Growth Trailer from Dave Gardner on Vimeo.

GrowthBusters follows Gardner as he questions the push for never-ending economic growth in the U.S. and the world.

“If I have one goal on this planet, it is to make it okay to question growth,” he tells Climate Progress. “I’m not afraid to say I’m against growth.”

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Click to Enlarge:

Yes, this amazing Brian McFadden comic strip was actually in the NY Times today! (see The NY Times Abandons the Story of the Century and Joins the Energy and Climate Ignorati

Related Posts:

• Last Two Winters’ Warm Extremes More Severe Than Their Cold Snaps, Study Finds

• An amazing, though clearly little-known, scientific fact: We get more snow storms in warm years!

You’re looking at a whole lot of heat.

Southern Methodist University’s Geothermal Laboratory recently released a map that proves once again how much potential energy is locked beneath America. SMU’s resource map, which took years to develop with funding from Google.org, shows that there are enough technically recoverable resources throughout the U.S. to equal 10 times the amount of coal capacity in place today.

Other maps have shown similar data. Last year, SMU issued a map (also funded by Google) that showed massive geothermal potential under West Virginia, an area not typically seen as suitable for the technology. In 2007, MIT Researcher Jeff Tester analyzed deep “hot rock” resources, showing that the U.S has 100 GW of potential for Enhanced Geothermal Systems [EGS] — an emerging type of plant design in which a developer creates an artificial well by pumping water through deep rocks, rather than using direct steam from hot water reservoirs closer to the surface.

So big deal, right? Another map shows we have tons of resources. Why is this so different from the others?

Well, geothermal exploration can be a very risky business. It’s not uncommon for a developer to spend 3/5ths of capital on the exploration and drilling phase of a project. And if the resources aren’t there, that’s millions of dollars down the…bore hole.

This map and corresponding study gives the geothermal industry another great tool for evaluating resources, particularly in areas on the East Coast where developers haven’t ventured. SMU provides an explanation (and a good video of EGS starring Energy Secretary Steven Chu):

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