It is time to end the quagmire of outdated energy subsidies built up over a century of programs once intended to help develop innovative ideas for energy development. They are now nearly all aiding and abetting taxpayers money flowing to companies and individuals no longer deserving to feed at the government trough.
No one in the lifetime of my readers will ever see energy shortages in the United States again. Awesome new technologies have allowed our nation to move from worrying about running out of oil to no longer having space to store all the oil and gas we are capable of developing.
Of course that problem of abundance has been exacerbated by the pandemic that has shut our nation and the world down for weeks. That will in time pass away and our abundance will settle back to normalcy. Sadly the energy industry will shake out with the survival of the fittest, but that ultimately is the way of the world for all industries.
While the vast dollars expended on dozens of subsidy type programs are near impossible to pin down, the great number of programs developed long ago can give us an idea of wasted tax dollars. Most of these programs should have ended long ago, but as we all know government programs never die. An example is that, believe it or not, Peter Ferrara was able to track the names of 187 different means tested welfare programs in his 2016 book, Power To The People. Obviously many of them should have been phased out long ago. I will not attempt to uncover the breadth of all energy subsidies but rather to make a case that it is time to end all of them.