Environmental CEOs Call for End to Fossil Fuel Subsidies

The drumbeat to end subsidies to the fossil fuel industry continued today as the CEOs of eighteen national environmental organizations, including NRDC, called for adoption of President Biden’s plan to cut $121 billion in subsidies to the fossil fuel industry. 

All fossil fuel subsidies should be eliminated. They make no sense in a time when renewable energy and energy efficiency are clearly the path of the future. Such favorable treatment for fossil fuel companies put taxpayers in the position of supporting a dirty, expensive, and climate-destroying industry. And this at a time when the damage from climate change are being felt in fires, extreme heat, and storms across America.

In a letter to National Climate Advisor Gina McCarthy, the CEOs noted that giveaways in the U.S. tax code “help to prop up an industry linked to an estimated 350,000 deaths due to particulate pollution and trillions in damage each year due to climate change in the United States—burdens that are disproportionately borne by Black, Brown, and Indigenous communities.”

Several legislative proposals under consideration in Congress propose to enact cuts to fossil fuel subsidies.  Senator Ron Wyden’s (D-OR) Clean Energy for America Act, for instance, will eliminate a number of subsidies that hand billions each year to oil, gas, and coal companies.   

The CEOs also noted that ending fossil fuel subsidies worldwide could reduce CO₂ emissions by 500 million to two billion metric tons per year by 2030—roughly one-quarter of all existing emission reduction pledges by countries under the Paris Agreement.  

The United States government has made repeated commitments to end fossil fuel subsidies but has yet to take action to put those commitments into practice.

Now is the time to turn these commitments into reality.