Follow The Money Both Ways

Someone on a podcast says clean energy is a racket: a way for connected people to get rich off government money.

A lot of people nod. And the inconvenient part, for me, is that the instinct is a good one.

Government money attracts opportunists. Subsidies create weird incentives. Politicians love a ribbon-cutting in front of a machine they had nothing to do with. If you suspect somebody is making money off all this solar, you’re right. Building infrastructure is a business, and somebody always gets paid.

So let’s do it properly. Follow the money honestly, in both directions, and see where the suspicion lands.

Yes, Solar Got Paid

Start with the part clean-energy advocates tend to skip.

In recent years, wind and solar have received more direct federal subsidy than oil and gas. Not a little more. The Energy Information Administration tallied federal energy subsidies for fiscal years 2016 through 2022 and found that renewables got about $84 billion, 46 percent of the total. Solar alone got about $37 billion and wind about $19 billion. Coal, oil, and gas together got roughly $25 billion.

In 2022 alone, renewables took more than half of all federal energy subsidies. Then the Inflation Reduction Act, passed that same year, expanded the clean-energy tax credits considerably.

The rooftop end of the business has had real problems too, the kind you may have met at your own front door. In 2024 the Federal Trade Commission put out a warning about solar scams: door-knockers impersonating utility workers, “free panels” pitches, promises of rebates that didn’t exist, high-pressure contracts. In June 2025, two of the biggest residential-solar financing companies, Sunnova and Mosaic, filed for bankruptcy within days of each other, leaving many customers unsure who would stand behind their loans and warranties.

If you’ve been suspicious of the clean-energy money, some of that suspicion was earned. Hold onto it. Then do the same thing to the other side.

Old Money Looks Like Scenery

Now look at what that tally makes easy to miss. Some of the oil and gas industry’s advantages are so old they’ve stopped looking like subsidies at all.

The oil and gas industry has been allowed to immediately write off “intangible drilling costs,” the wages, fuel, and site prep behind a new well, since 1913, the year the federal income tax was born. Since 1926, producers have been allowed to deduct a fixed percentage of their gross income from a well as “depletion,” even after they’ve written off more than the well cost them. (Since the 1970s that break has been limited to independent producers and royalty owners, the people paid a cut of what a well produces.)

Those two provisions are worth something like $1 billion to $2.5 billion a year in federal revenue, depending on whose estimate you use. They are in the EIA’s count; in any single year they’re small next to the recent clean-energy credits. Democratic administrations have proposed repealing them in budget after budget. They’re still there.

The bigger difference is permanence. Solar and wind credits came with expiration dates and had to be fought over in Congress, renewed, extended, and argued about on cable news. The oil and gas provisions are written into the permanent tax code. They don’t expire, so they don’t make headlines. And some of the fossil system’s biggest advantages never show up in a subsidy table at all: what states hand out, what the public charges for drilling on public land, and what it costs the Navy to keep the world’s oil routes open.

Then there’s the land. Companies drilling on federal land pay the public a royalty on what they extract. The minimum onshore rate was set at 12.5 percent in 1920 and stayed there for a century, below what states like Texas and New Mexico charge for drilling on their own state land. The 2022 climate law raised it to 16.67 percent.

That lasted three years.

Congress Ran The Experiment

In July 2025, Congress passed the One Big Beautiful Bill Act, and it reads like an answer key to this chapter.

On the clean-energy side, it ended the main wind and solar tax credits for projects that aren’t placed in service (up and running) by the end of 2027, unless construction starts by July 4, 2026. It ended the federal EV tax credits on September 30, 2025, and the homeowner rooftop-solar credit at the end of 2025.

On the fossil side, it cut the federal onshore oil and gas royalty back to 12.5 percent. It required quarterly onshore lease sales (auctions of the right to drill on public land) and at least two offshore lease sales a year through 2039. It cut the royalty on federal coal from 12.5 percent to 7 percent and opened 4 million more acres to coal leasing. It pushed the start of a fee on methane leaks from 2024 out to 2034. It even let oil and gas companies deduct intangible drilling costs against the corporate minimum tax.

You can like or hate that law. But notice what it does to the “it only exists because of subsidies” argument: it turns it into a test. The wind and solar credits are going away on a schedule (batteries kept theirs into the 2030s). The century-old fossil preferences are staying, and some got sweeter. It’s too early to grade the test, because 2026 is distorted by developers racing the deadline. But if solar keeps getting built after its credits expire, that argument should retire with them.

Follow It To The Lobby

Subsidies are one way money moves. Influence is the other.

The oil and gas industry spent more than $150 million lobbying the federal government in 2024, its highest total since 2009, according to OpenSecrets data. In the 2024 election cycle it put about $219 million into campaign contributions and outside spending, and an analysis of OpenSecrets data found 88 percent of its money went to Republicans. Those aren’t charity numbers. That’s an industry buying a seat at every table where its rules get written.

Fair is fair: the clean-energy industry lobbies too, and it spent a record of about $64 million in 2024. Electric utilities, which own plenty of both kinds of power plants, outspent oil and gas on lobbying in the first half of 2025. Everybody with a stake in energy is in Washington.

But scale and history matter. Oil and gas have been spending at this level for decades, and the spending sits on top of a century of trade associations, think tanks, ad campaigns, and classroom materials (the next chapter is about those). A $64 million lobby is real money. It’s also about a decade old. The other one has spent generations shaping what the public thinks of as common sense.

The political game is simple: make your own costs invisible and make your competitor’s costs feel outrageous. Solar has land costs, supply chains, and subsidies, and those get talked about constantly. Fossil fuels have land costs, supply chains, and subsidies too, plus a military dimension we’ll get to in Chapter 6. Those mostly get called “the economy.”

The Rogan Test

Joe Rogan is a useful example here, and not as a punchline. His show is built on a very American kind of suspicion: distrust official stories, assume incentives matter, don’t let anybody manage you. Tens of millions of people share that instinct, and plenty of them are exactly who this book is written for. Pew found that about one in five American adults now regularly get news from “news influencers,” and among adults under 30 it’s more than a third.

The country would be better off if more people asked “who benefits?” before buying a story. Rogan himself, talking with Donald Trump in 2024, called nuclear “probably the cleanest, safest form of electricity we could generate,” a perfectly defensible engineering opinion that a lot of environmentalists spent decades getting wrong.

But suspicion isn’t the same as doing the math, and on his show it tends to run in one direction. In at least two 2025 episodes, according to an analysis by Yale Climate Connections, Rogan brought up the huge sums being spent on the clean-energy transition in a way that implied something shady. That same year he cited a chart of 485 million years of Earth’s temperature as evidence that “the temperature on Earth is plummeting,” a misreading climate scientists lined up to correct. I’d love to hear the same energy pointed at the oil industry’s lobbying budget, its campaign money, or its century-old tax breaks.

Suspicion that only points one way is worth a lot to whoever it skips. If I can teach you to distrust only my competitors, I don’t need you to trust me. I just need you to distrust them more.

“Somebody profits from this” doesn’t mean “this technology is fake.” If it did, we’d have to throw out medicine, the internet, farming, and the entire defense industry. The better question is what kind of profit it is. Profit from producing useful power is one thing. Profit from keeping an old dependency alive is another.

Politics Pretending To Be Neutral

Once you start watching for it, the double standard is everywhere.

When a state gives an oil company a tax break, that’s “economic development.” When it supports a solar factory, that’s “green ideology.” When a pipeline needs eminent domain, that’s “infrastructure.” When a transmission line needs it, that’s “government overreach.” When gas prices spike because of a war, that’s “unfortunate reality.” When electric rates rise because the grid is underbuilt, that’s “clean energy’s fault.”

So follow the money to the solar developer. Oppose the bad projects, expose the sketchy financing, and don’t let a company steamroll a town because it learned three climate phrases. That’s all fair.

Then keep going. Follow it to the depletion allowance from 1926, the royalty rate from 1920 that Congress just restored, the $150 million a year in lobbying, and the politicians who say “energy independence” while defending the fuel system most exposed to global price swings.

If green energy is a money grab, fossil energy is one of the most successful money grabs in history. It just got there early enough to rename itself reality.

How do you rename yourself reality? It turns out you start with the kids.