Inside Climate News: “Trump’s ‘Energy Dominance’ Agenda Sounds Like a Petrostate Plan to Some”
This piece cites RFF research and quotes Fellow Daniel Raimi about the ways that the fossil fuel industry are woven into the US political fabric.
But the fossil fuel industry is also woven into the US political fabric in ways that resemble the structure of petrostates. More than 60 percent of the $138 billion in taxes that the fossil fuel industry pays annually goes to state, local and tribal governments, according to a study by the Washington, DC-based think tank Resources for the Future, or RFF.
Wyoming gets 59 percent of its state budget from fossil fuel revenue; North Dakota, 29 percent; and Alaska, 21 percent. Other states, though less reliant, take in staggering sums, led by Texas, at $14.6 billion annually; California, $7.8 billion; and Pennsylvania, $4.4 billion. And the money going into state coffers reflects the far larger impact the industry is having on state economies and jobs...
“The US has always had a hard time enacting climate policy,” said Daniel Raimi, a fellow at RFF who led its fossil fuel revenue study. “The Inflation Reduction Act was the exception rather than the rule, and it’s also a very unusual kind of climate policy. Most of the rest of the world use carbon pricing or regulatory tools. We couldn’t do any of that because of the political dynamics, so we went for the subsidy-based approach.”
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“I think it’s worth remembering that this is not that abnormal for the United States,” Raimi said. “Unfortunately, this is kind of where we have been for most of the last few decades.”
