This excellent data comes to us courtesy of the paper, “A half century of US federal government energy incentives:
value, distribution, and policy implications” by economists Roger H. Bezdek and Robert Wendling of Management Information Services. Granted, renewable energy has gotten more backing since 2003, but the overall trends are still good.
Paired with my previous All You Need to Know post about energy R&D, you can see how little the U.S. government has really invested in developing non-fossil, non-nuclear power. I’ll have more on these issues soon, but if you want a good primer on U.S. energy tax policy, particularly as it relates to the oil industry and the “depletion allowance” take a look at this succinct Congressional briefing.
In the top graph, it’s important to note that I included big hydro — you know, the Hoover Dam, etc — into the green tech number. Otherwise, as you can see in the bottom graph, Federal support for green tech has been miniscule. Renewables have received just about 5% of total energy incentives from the government. Add in geothermal and you get to 6%.
Here’s the Google doc that generated the charts above.
Could you define each of the cost categories? In particular, what are regulation and taxation (is it all depletion or does it include something else) costs?
There’s a detailed discussion in the paper, which is linked, including all of the laws and components of the estimates. For oil: Taxation bonuses mostly resulted from the utilization of “the percentage depletion and intangible drilling provisions of the Federal tax code as an incentive for exploration and development.” On regulation, they pointed to three main incentives: