Oh, pulleez! Can we dispense with the "big oil subsidies" nonsense. There is not now, nor ever has been, US government subsidies of oil production or processing. The so-called government subsidies that anti-oil people bray about are the very same depreciation and depletion rules and foreign tax credits that govern every other manufacturing or mining company, and many of them have been in effect since 1913. The reason that US motor fuel prices are lower than in Europe is that we have not slapped similarly huge taxes on fuels at the pump.
My sister is a petroleum Geologist in Bakersfield and my father knew Fred Hartly (CEO of Union Oil for many years). I do believe we should be moving away from oil as the cheap to produce oil is running out (we aren't running out of oil, just the easy to get oil), and oil does damage the environment. CO2 debate aside, oil damages the environment from spilled oil from cars washing off roadways into waterways, it is responsible for poor air quality in many cities (I am allergic to petrochemical smog and suffered constantly as a kid growing up in Los Angeles), and it can spill causing various damage, especially if the oil gets into a body of water.
We will also need oil for some time to come. By a wide margin it's still the best transportation fuel for some purposes, such as aircraft and ocean going ships. There are some ideas for alternatives, but we don't even have working prototypes and may not for years to come.
Rather than a hell bent crash program to end the use of oil, which would likely crash the economy as we don't have any alternatives for some applications and scaling up the alternatives for other applications (such as electric passenger cars) is going to take decades to complete even with heavy investment.
That said, there are many tax incentives now and in the past that are/were aimed at the oil and gas industry. Here are a couple of sites that discuss the history and/or incentives available:
There will be subsidies: A brief history of tax breaks for oil companies
Oil: A Big Investment With Big Tax Breaks
I know the first site is from Mother Jones, which is not credible to some people, but this history is pretty accurate IMO. The article is heavy on facts.
Armond Hammer who was the CEO for Occidental Petroleum for many years became an oil company executive by accident due to oil subsidies. He was an MD by trade and had made his first fortunes in the USSR. He worked as a physician there early on and also invested in an early Soviet factory that made him money. As things were chaotic, he also collected Russian artworks many of them looted during the Revolution. In 1930 Stalin became too paranoid and expelled Hammer, but allowed him to take his "household goods" with him which included the treasures in his possession. Most of the Faberge eggs in museums outside Russia were in that collection as well as many other pieces of Russian art in the west.
Living in California and working as an MD, he did what a lot of wealthy did and invested in an oil drilling project. Today the Geology has advanced to a degree that there is a lot less guesswork in drilling oil wells, but there were and still are hefty tax breaks for investors in oil wells. Originally this was to offset the costs of dry holes, but these days it's a giveaway because dry holes are rare.
Anyway, Hammer's tax dodge didn't work. The project hit a pretty substantial oil find and his investment was big enough he ended up owning enough of the company to take it over. It all started out as a way to lose some money on paper to lower his taxes.
I do agree with you that the primary reason gasoline is cheaper in the US than most other countries is the lower taxes. There is a chart out there of gasoline taxes per country and the US is one of the lowest in the world.
If you think fuel prices are "propped up" by the US government, explain how gasoline prices were allowed, by an openly petroleum-hostile administration, to drop from near $4 per gallon to near $2 in two years and natural gas prices to drop to the lowest in history in the same time? Oil and gas is a world market with product flowing into and out of nations according to where producers and refiners can make the best returns on investment. Oil and gas are as close to a pure supply and demand market as there has ever been.
It has been a pure supply and demand market in the past, but it's also been manipulated by governments for various purposes. Through the 1980s oil was low despite supply and demand. I heard an interview with an investigative journalist who looked into it. He had interviewed the last Soviet Trade Minister and he believed a contributing factor to the fall of the USSR was low oil prices. The only thing the USSR had to trade internationally was oil and the low oil prices destroyed their economy.
The same author posited that oil prices were artificially high from the 1990s through the end of 2014 to hurt China who imports most of its oil. The US also did a number of things to disrupt any sweet deals the Chinese tried to make to get cheaper oil. I heard this interview around 2010 and he predicted that oil prices out remain high until either the Chinese economy collapsed, or the US needed to punish someone with low oil prices.
After the 2008 crash, people were scratching their heads that oil prices remained high despite lower demand around the world and increasing supply in the US. It wasn't until the end of 2014, just after Russia seized Crimea that oil prices suddenly dropped. The low oil prices have devastated Russia's economy as well as Iran's. It was one of the things that got Iran serious about the nuclear talks.
Thomas Friedman was speculating about an oil war back in late 2014:
https://www.nytimes.com/2014/10/15/opinion/thomas-friedman-a-pump-war.html?_r=2
Natural gas, which is not as portable from the continent where it was produced is affected more by supply and demand. The large supply in North America has driven prices down despite increased demand as more electricity generation is done with natural gas. The coal industry is dying largely of simple economics. It's cheaper to generate electricity other ways than burning coal. Environmental regulations accelerates the process, but coal is a dying industry to a large degree.
In contrast, EV and solar PV subsidies have been aimed, rightly or wrongly, at helping nascent industries grow in order to fulfill politically favored environmental goals. To the extent that those subsidies have helped people afford to buy Priuses, Volts, Leafs and, yes, Teslas, they have helped to make possible development of less expensive and more capable EVs like the upcoming Nissan's New Leaf, Tesla Model 3 and in-production Chevy Bolt (which absent Tesla's early success would never have been built) to become available to people of lower budgets. Similarly, PV subsidies helped enable the market to develop so that greater volume and competition have slashed PV prices such that less wealthy people can afford them.
The incentives for solar has spurred innovation which in turn lowered the cost of the equipment. Solar subsidies definitely help sell solar systems on houses and other buildings, but even without the subsidies solar is beginning to compete with other energy sources. Same with wind power.
I heard a story on NPR a few weeks ago where they interviewed a solar installed in Arizona. His primary area was a town with mostly retired people. He said most of the people living there were Republicans, but he didn't have to try to sell solar. It was selling itself just based on the cost of energy.
He said the typical scenario was some retirees would go play golf and one would complain about his $250 a month electric bill. Someone would chime in his was only $30 a month in the summer and by the time the conversation was done, another solar installation was sold just based on month to month electricity costs alone. The incentives were just gravy on top.
The purpose of the EV incentives was also to spur innovation and development to develop cost effective EVs and Tesla is going to do that with the Model 3. The Tesla incentives will run out not long after the Model 3 is introduced which is pretty much exactly the way the incentives were structured. Tesla will get to the point where they will be building a mass market EV that can stand on its own without incentives right about the time the incentive runs out for them. The incentives will still be there while the Model 3 ramps up, but it will be gone soon after full production is reached.
Some politicians like to claim government subsidies don't work (usually while supporting subsidies for certain industries they aren't attacking), but the EV and renewable energy incentives have worked well. Even setting aside environmental impact from other forms of energy, renewables make sense for long term economics.
Once installed, wind and solar produce electricity for only the cost of maintenance. The "fuel" is free. Hydroelectric is another renewable that is very inexpensive once the infrastructure is built and it too has free fuel. Because of hydroelectric Washington state has the cheapest electricity in the US and sells electricity to other states. It was also the center of aluminum ore extraction in the US because of the cheap electricity. Aluminum ore is smelted in electric furnaces.
Geothermal is yet another renewable, but both geothermal and hydroelectric have drawbacks. Most of the best sites for commercial scale hydroelectric and geothermal have already been developed and there are environmental impacts on wildlife from hydroelectric. Many of the best wind sites are still available, including offshore wind projects and solar can be run economically just about anywhere the sun shines much of the year, especially in the regions where the bulk of the population lives.
The key to get renewables to a point where they are cost effective is to bring down the cost of the hardware. In the 1970s and 1980s solar installations were not very efficient and the equipment cost so much, you might just barely break even by the time the equipment wore out. We now have solar panels that are cheaper to make and last longer as well as more efficient equipment. A lot of that came about because of incentives that encouraged development.
