Did you know that every time you go to the gas pump or heat your home, you’re effectively being charged twice?

First, you pay for the actual cost of the fuel itself — a cost that has risen 46 percent since 2019. Second, you’re also footing the bill for the billions of dollars Big Oil gets through special subsidies and tax breaks.

These handouts don’t go towards lowering prices for us. They help boost oil and gas companies' profits — at the expense of your wallet and our planet.

Let’s start with Big Oil’s favorite tax break, which it’s been benefiting from since 1913. (Yes, it even predates me.)

Its official name is the “intangible drilling cost deduction.” It sounds boring to us — but it’s so important to Big Oil that industry analysts have called it the “one subsidy to rule them all.” 

This tax break allows companies to write off as much as 80 percent of the costs of developing an oil or gas well within the first year of operation, such as employee wages for surveying lands. This tax break can be used before a single drop of oil is even produced. 

Big Oil has had this subsidy for over 110 years and it's helped the industry make a killing. How much longer will taxpayers be expected to foot the bill? 

Big Oil’s other favorite tax break allows companies to deduct the cost of major capital investments from their taxes right away. It’s called “bonus depreciation.” I know, so riveting.

Bonus depreciation does apply to all corporations, but it especially benefits industries with large equipment expenses like Big Oil. One pipeline company was recently able to use this special tax break to help wipe out its entire tax bill. It’s such a boon to the industry that the American Petroleum Institute named it one of their top lobbying priorities for 2025.

Dozens of other tax breaks help Big Oil skirt taxes on its foreign profits, too. U.S. companies that extract oil and gas abroad, like Chevron and ExxonMobil, regularly end up paying little to no U.S. corporate income tax on their profits from foreign drilling. 

All told, Big Oil extracts about $17 billion in direct industry specific tax breaks and subsidies every year.

And fossil fuel giants also stand to gain from the roll back of clean energy tax credits and investments. These have been lowering your energy costs, creating thousands of good-paying jobs, and reducing our dependence on oil and gas.

Big Oil doesn’t need to be propped up by our taxpayer dollars — they’re doing just fine. The top five oil companies soaked up profits over $100 billion in 2024 alone. 

And what does Big Oil do with these profits? It spends billions juicing its own stock prices with stock buybacks to further enrich its shareholders and executives, and spends millions more paying off politicians in Congress to do its bidding. In the last election cycle, Big Oil spent $445 million.

That flood of money is responsible for Big Oil’s special tax breaks and subsidies — despite voters overwhelmingly wanting to end them.

While we continue to pay through the nose at the pump and on our home energy bills, the climate crisis is accelerating and our planet is being polluted — with natural disasters costing the U.S. over $180 billion in 2024 alone.

It doesn’t have to be this way. As I’ve said, Big Oil’s agenda is not popular. 

It’s also not inevitable. We can fight back. 

The first step is spreading the truth about our giveaways to Big Oil. We need to keep fighting to get big money out of politics so we can reduce Big Oil’s influence on our democracy. And we need to advocate for our taxpayer dollars to be spent on programs that actually deliver for people — like investing in clean energy that reduces our energy bills and protects the environment.

This is the future we deserve.