As
Common Dreamsreported in January, the fossil fuel industry spent an estimated $445 million during the 2024 election cycle to elect President Donald Trump and other GOP candidates who serve their climate-wrecking interests, and it expects much in return.

“Domestic oil and gas companies, including from Lankford’s home state of Oklahoma, have warned their investors about the corporate alternative minimum tax,” Zibel and Shankar-Ross wrote. “The industry could soon be rewarded with specially tailored tax relief courtesy of their Republican political allies.”

As the report explains:

Here’s how the tax scheme works: In August 2022, President Joe Biden
signed the Inflation Reduction Act, which made historic climate investments. To help pay for new spending, the bill included a set of corporate tax increases, the largest of which was the $222 billion corporate alternative minimum tax. This tax is meant to prevent corporations that deliver massive profits to investors from paying nothing or nearly nothing in taxes because of corporate-friendly tax loopholes. Under the corporate minimum tax, if a company reports an average of at least $1 billion in annual income over three years, then it must pay 15% of that reported income in taxes, minus certain deductions.

The report highlights Republican efforts to eliminate the minimum tax, including via legislation
introduced by Sen. John Barrasso (R-Wyo.) and endorsed by the American Petroleum Institute, U.S. Chamber of Commerce, National Association of Manufacturers, National Mining Association, Western Energy Alliance, and industry lobbyists.

The bill introduced by Lankford would enable fossil fuel companies to skirt the minimum tax by allowing them to deduct “intangible” drilling costs, a tactic used as an effective subsidy for more than 120 years. Zibel and Shankar-Ross described the tax dodge as “the oldest and the largest fossil fuel subsidy on the books,” and one which “allows all of the costs for drilling an oil or gas well to be deducted immediately in the year they are incurred.”

“If individual taxpayers understood the magnitude of the extreme subsidies for Big Oil, they would be shocked.”

“It is simply outrageous that the GOP is using its trifecta to create yet another fossil fuel subsidy,” Shankar-Ross said in a
statement, referring to Republicans’ control of the White House and both chambers of Congress. “If this polluter handout is snuck into the GOP tax bill, then cuts to Medicaid and food stamps could well pay for another giveaway to Big Oil. That’s obscene.”

Zibel asserted that “oil and gas companies are using the political influence they purchased to dodge paying even a minimal part of their fair share.”

“If individual taxpayers understood the magnitude of the extreme subsidies for Big Oil, they would be shocked,” he added. “The newest effort to bypass even the most modest of tax bills by the industry is shocking, but sadly not surprising.”