50 Years Of Heavily Subsidized Oil Industry Lobbying Against Change, Against Action, Against Science, Against Reality

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The oil industry has fought against government support for clean technologies for more than half a century, the Guardian can reveal, even as vast subsidies have propped up its polluting business model. It lobbied lawmakers to block support for low-carbon technologies such as solar panels, electric cars and heat pumps as far back as the 1960s, analysis shows. Trade associations in the US and Europe stymied green innovations under the guise of supporting a “technology neutral” approach to avoiding the damage done by burning their fuels.

The same incumbents were happy to lobby for government support when they were getting started, and had continued to benefit from it since, said Dario Kenner, a visiting research fellow at the University of Sussex who trawled through decades of public statements from the American Petroleum Institute (API) and FuelsEurope. “It’s obviously hypocritical to call for technological neutrality when you are the dominant technology,” he said.

Kenner documented dozens of examples of the oil industry pressuring governments to hold back support for renewable energy, restrict funding for the development of clean technologies and weaken environmental rules that favoured their uptake. Lobbyists on both sides of the Atlantic argued that government subsidies for clean technologies distorted free markets. Activists say their position is “dishonest” because the oil industry benefits from tax credits and other financial help from governments, and pays for only a fraction of the damage its fuels do to people and the planet.

In 2022, the total subsidies for fossil fuels – including costs to society – came to $760bn (£592bn) in the US and $310bn (£264bn) in the EU, according to the International Monetary Fund. The revelations were “outrageous but frankly unsurprising”, said Shira Stanton from the campaign group Beyond Fossil Fuels, who was not involved in the analysis. “It has been proven that the fossil fuel industry caused the climate crisis and deliberately lied about it as they hid the science,” she said. “So finding out that they knew renewable energy was such a threat to their industry that they had to lobby policymakers to rig the market against cleaner and cheaper technology to protect profits is just par for the course.”

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https://www.theguardian.com/environment/2024/mar/08/oil-industry-has-sought-to-block-state-backing-for-green-tech-since-1960s