Perspective: The federal government subsidized the carbon economy. Now it should subsidize a greener one.
Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez greets audiences following a televised town hall event on the Green New Deal in New York on March 29. By Ryan Driskell Tate Ryan Driskell Tate is a Ph.D. candidate in American history at Rutgers University, completing a book on energy development in the American West. April 26 Last month, President Trump mocked the Green New Deal in his most ornery criticism of the project to date, calling the proposal “preposterous” and a “central planning disaster.
The nation’s energy sector has never functioned as a capitalist “free market.” In fact, the pervasive use of fossil fuels today is the product of corporate-friendly policies through which the government has subsidized the industry and performed the spadework for its expansion.
The coal companies counted on the National Guard to break strikes, suppress labor conflict and maintain the smooth and uninterrupted flow of their commodities. Federal and state politicians granted energy companies the right of way on private estates and opened public lands for mineral companies to stake their claims. The nation’s energy firms even expanded their holdings abroad and created the “strategic” need for U.S. foreign policy to align with the protection of mineral resources overseas .
Congress passed the Connally Hot Oil Act of 1935 only after major oil firms begged the government to protect them from the hard-edge of the free market. This new law instituted government sanctions that pro-rationed surpluses to keep prices from falling and shielded inefficient producers.
Trump’s presidency has shred whatever subtly there once was to the old ruse. He has told fossil-fuel interests that their “full potential can only be realized when government promotes energy development” and promised to “eliminate the barriers to domestic energy production, like never before.
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