Big Oil’s been busy in all sorts of bad ways

It is hard to exaggerate just how strenuously President Big Oil Stooge has been sucking at Big Oil’s greasy tit. Or whatever the guy has to suck.

The One Big Beautiful Bill Act (OBBBA) that was signed into law on July 4, 2025, is much more damaging to clean energy in the United States than I and most people, think. OBBBA not only takes away tax incentives and other clean energy development programs that had been defined and passed into law in the Inflation Reduction Act (IRA) of 2022 in the Biden Administration, but it tilts the table for fossil fuels. OBBBA does this mainly through tax policy, disappearing tax credits from clean energy and adding more tax credits and other financial boons to fossil fuel energy. OBBBA uses specific tax provisions to shift market dynamics and encourage investment in “traditional” energy sources.

Here are some of the glad tidings for the fossil fuel industry:

1. Rolling back fossil fuel royalty rate increases mandated by previous legislation (IRA) to put back in place royalty rate structures for onshore and offshore oil and gas leases.
2. Providing more favorable tax treatment for intangible drilling and development costs (IDCs) to fossil fuel and introduces a new tax credit for metallurgical coal.
3. Accelerates the phase-out and adds restrictions to many clean energy tax credits established by the IRA
4. Makes it very difficult for clean energy projects to qualify for tax advantages because construction of such projects must start by July 4, 2026 or they must be operational by the end of 2027, greatly limiting opportunities for developers

It is largely about market signals by making these tax changes, with the effect that OBBBA makes fossil fuel extraction more profitable while making new renewable energy projects less financially attractive.

OBBBA and PUHCA and Forgotten Lessons from the Past

The Public Utility Holding Company Act of 1935 (PUHCA), also known as the Wheeler-Rayburn Act, is a US federal law giving the Securities and Exchange Commission authority to regulate, license, and break up electric utility holding companies. It limits holding company operations to a single state, thus subjecting them to effective state regulation. The impetuous for PUCHA was the spiking rates for electricity from huge electricity companies that spanned states and owned many related businesses (electric street cars being a common choice) and were in fact huge conglomerations without competition. No competition, higher and higher charges.

The passage of the 1935 act was a difficult birth, long in gestation. Why so difficult and so long a process? Well, The National Electric Light Association (NELA)—the main trade group for the electric conglomerates—organized the largest U.S. public relations campaign of the 1920s. Public relations, a practice that grew out of the propaganda battles of WWI, at the hands of well-funded NELA, was aimed, according to Wikipedia’s history of PUHCA at “stigmatiz[ing] public ownership [of electric utilities] on the one hand while promoting the rapid consolidation of the private sector into a few giant multi-tiered holding companies. In the early 1920s, nearly 2,000 cities had public electric utilities, and a war was being waged against them.” It’s a fascinating history and it took 15 years and Senate resolutions directed at the FTC to investigate the PR campaigns underwritten by “six to ten layered pyramid holding company structures that concentrated financial power in the hands of a few.”

I’m cribbing mightily from the Wikipedia article, but the full article is fascinating reading, especially in light of obscene concentration of money today in the hands of the few. Would you be surprised to learn that early on in the 1020s-1930s investigations, large scale corruption was found among the electric conglomerates? Would you be surprised that electricity rates kept rising, becoming unaffordable for a greater and greater number of people even through the early years of the Great Depression?

Yeah, I didn’t think so.

The Public Utility Holding Company Act of 1935 was a form of direct structural regulation. PUHCA was designed to break up large, multi-state utility monopolies and regulate their corporate structure and financial practices to prevent abuses and ensure fair rates. It was one of several New Deal trust-busting and securities regulation initiatives that were enacted following the Wall Street Crash of 1929 and the ensuing Great Depression. In 1932 “eight of the largest utility holding companies controlled 73 percent of the investor-owned electric industry. Their complex, highly leveraged, corporate structures were very difficult for individual states to regulate.”

The efforts to pass the bill were met by a huge counter-effort. The Wikipedia article states, “The FTC investigation produced thousands of pages of testimony on how the country’s electric industry successfully enlisted the support of the press across the country with its strategy of dangling advertising dollars and submitted vast quantities of anonymous materials to it for publication. The country’s mostly conservative press had become allies with the industry in its goal to stigmatize the municipal ownership community as un-American.”

Sounds a lot like the way business works in America today. Keep the use of media in mind as you read the rest of this post.

But what does OBBBA have to do with any of this? Google answers:

The One Big Beautiful Bill Act (OBBBA) of 2025 did not repeal or directly amend PUHCA, but it significantly changed the energy landscape that PUHCA was designed to regulate. PUHCA’s primary goal was to regulate and break up complex utility holding company structures, while the OBBBA focused on modifying energy tax credits, which indirectly affects the structure of the utility industry by altering investment incentives… By changing the financial incentives for energy projects, the OBBBA influences the types of investments and structures that utility companies will be able to form in the future, which is a core concern of PUHCA.

Energy Innovation is a non-partisan energy and climate policy think tank that describes itself this way: “We provide customized research and policy analysis to decision-makers to support policy design that enhances security and access to affordable energy, while reducing emissions at the speed and scale required for a safe climate future.” On July 1, 2025, the think tank published a report titled “Final Analysis: Economic Impacts Of U.S. ‘One Big Beautiful Bill Act’ Energy Provisions,” by Robbie Orvis, Megan Mahajan, and Dan O’Brien. The deck of the report says it all: “The One Big Beautiful Bill Act makes energy more expensive, costs jobs, and makes it harder to meet growing electricity demand.”

In case you want more, here’s how the report opens:

The “One Big Beautiful Bill Act” (OBBBA) was signed into law on July 4th. The final legislation contains policies that would increase oil and gas leasing, cut fossil fuel royalty rates, repeal clean energy tax credits, and delay funding for agricultural and forestry conservation. The law will harm America by cutting new electricity capacity additions, increasing consumer power prices, and reducing U.S. GDP and job growth:

• • Power generation capacity will fall 340 gigawatts by 2035, raising costs to meet growing demand and damaging industrial competitiveness
  • Wholesale electricity prices will increase 25 percent by 2030 and 74 percent by 2035; electricity rates paid by consumers will increase between 9-18 percent by 2035
  • Household energy costs will increase $170 annually by 2035
  • America loses $980 billion in cumulative GDP through the budget reconciliation window
  • Workers suffer 760,000 lost jobs by 2030

By average ranking for household energy cost increases and population-weighted job losses, the five biggest losers from OBBBA’s passage include:

• • South Carolina
  • Florida
  • Texas
  • Kentucky
  • North Carolina

Gee, all Red States, but who’s counting. Not those states’ congressmen and senators, apparently.

Here’s another interesting article that puts the OBBBA in perspective as a clean energy killer, this one from Utility Dive, which “provides in-depth journalism and insight into the most impactful news and trends shaping the utility industry. The newsletters and website cover topics such as smart grid, regulation and policy, demand response, generation, and more.” The article, titled “Navigating the One Big Beautiful Bill era in US power markets,” published on October 8, 2025, and was written by Kushal Patel, Gregory Gangelhoff, Tali Perelman, and Amber Mahone. There’s a nice chart courtesy of Energy and Environmental Economics, but these paragraphs tell the tale just as well:

Solar: Exposed to trade policy more than any other resource, solar faces a wide range of cost impacts. Capital costs could increase by 30% to over 300%, depending on AD/CVD tariffs. Corresponding levelized costs could rise by 44% to 470%. Solar also faces reduced long-term certainty from OBBBA’s shorter tax credit timeline. If projects experience only reciprocal tariffs and minimum AD/CVD tariffs announced by the Commerce Department, E3 would expect levelized costs to increase by up to 114%. This is before incorporating FEOC dynamics, however, which E3 would expect to further increase costs all else being equal.

Wind: Wind is similarly affected by earlier expiration of production and investment tax credits, which introduces uncertainty around project economics in the 2030s. While not as tariff-sensitive as solar, policy changes still shift wind’s relative cost-competitiveness. Furthermore, increasing federal hostility to wind development, such as restricting development on federal land and revoking permits for projects already under construction, seem to pose greater risk to wind than solar.

Battery Storage: Tariff impacts are smaller in range but more certain, largely due to dependence on imported lithium-ion cells. Battery projects are less affected by OBBBA’s tax credit revisions, with eligibility extending through 2032. Under safe harbor provisions, which let developers preserve credit eligibility based on when construction begins, some projects could still qualify through 2036 before a credit phase-out period begins. Storage may be more susceptible to risk of FEOC non-compliance, however, given the dependence of the current supply chain on China. Slower solar development may also hamper battery economics in the medium to longer term.

Gas: Under the highest tariff assumptions, the competitiveness of new gas combined cycle plants is enhanced, most notably for projects requiring around-the-clock power. These dynamics could influence build decisions through 2029, with the greatest effect on projects still in early planning or pre-construction phases. The rapid increase in data center load also enlarges the market for CCGTs due to higher run times. Gas CTs may also maintain an advantage over battery storage for peaking applications, at least until battery supply chains can adapt to the new tariff regime.

Bottom line: fossil fuels have gamed the energy sector.

Where are the Muckrakers?

This information about OBBBA is known, but in bits and pieces, mostly. When one considers the significant hit on the American economy—never mind the climate change issue—one might think this is a pretty important news story. One might even be up in arms, right? Well, Trump keeps damaging the country—literally, with the East Wing teardown—and corruption runs wild, often funded by the billionaires, so there’s a lot to keep up with.

In the November 14, 2025, The Guardian, George Monbiot takes  a pretty good stab at this sort of reporting, pointing out that, unfortunately, all is all quiet on the western front. The piece is titled “Dark forces are preventing us fighting the climate crisis – by taking knowledge hostage.”

The sub-title says it all: “The fundamental problem is this: that most of the means of communication are owned or influenced by the very rich.” Here’s the opening paragraph:

If this were just a climate crisis, we would fix it. The technology, money and strategies have all been at hand for years. What stifles effective action is a deadly conjunction: the climate crisis running headlong into the epistemic crisis.

This is well worth the read, and if you remember from earlier, there are some spooky analogs today to the PR campaigns of the 1920s and 1930s aimed at protecting electricity conglomerates’ interests. He cites several examples from the BBC, which, he admits, may not be owned by billionaires, but nonetheless plays their game:

While [BBC] no longer provides a platform for outright climate denial, almost every day it breaks its own editorial guidelines by hosting Tufton Street junktanks (which often argue against environmental action) without revealing who funds them. Shouldn’t we be allowed to know whether or not they are sponsored by fossil fuel companies?

The BBC told its presenter Evan Davis to stop making his own podcast about heat pumps, on the grounds that discussing this technology meant “treading on areas of public controversy”. Why are heat pumps controversial? Because the Energy and Utilities Association, which lobbies for gas appliances, paid a public affairs company to make them so. The company, WPR, boasted that it set out to “spark outrage”. The media, BBC included, were all too happy to oblige.

“Junktanks.” You gotta love it. In The Steep Climes Quartet series I write in a number of junktanks in the service of Big Oil, but the first two books are already published and as much as I like the term, I can at best get this term into the third book’s manuscript, which is undergoing some polishing.

The great term notwithstanding, Monbiot’s point about the media controlled by those with huge stacks of money is a good one to remember. Know thine enemies.

Indeed, Who Pays to End the Gas Age?

It was a busy day for The Guardian. On the same day Monbiot published his piece, an editorial titled “The Guardian view on Cop30: someone has to pay for the end of the oil and gas age” published. Coming from COP30, the editorial strikes a note of mixed optimism and pessimism with its subtitle, “The fossil-fuel era is drawing to a close, but at a pace far too slow for the planet’s good or a fair transition to a clean energy future.”

The fossil fuel era is indeed drawing to a close, but when? The fossil fuel industry—especially in America—is playing a long game that includes buying market advantages like the OBBBA and tariffs while trying to set in motion the buildout of a great many new gas generation plants that they can keep feeding their natural gas for decades to come.

The editorial takes a lap around how much money is needed by developing countries for clean energy buildout and how much money the developed world seems interested handing over, and the developed countries are many steps behind. There’s a real opportunity for developed countries with the means—and here in the States, the political will, hopefully, at some point—to develop the clean energy manufacturing base and practice a new type of Great Powers diplomacy, where clean power tech is literally handed out to address the energy poverty of the Global South, while blocking Big Oil from selling their poison. The fact is that clean energy wins and wins big in free competition. It is all win/win, except for Big Oil (yay!), with the developed countries not only developing the clean their own domestic manufacturing base but enjoying the lower costs for clean energy that comes from economies of scale. A great card to play if you are into playing that Great Powers game, but the better end is abundant power across the world, a vast reduction in greenhouse gas emissions, and a low, low electricity bill in the mailbox every month.

We’ve seen how hard and dirty Big Oil plays, of course, and OBBBA and tariffs are hard blows against clean energy.

And Big Oil is still at it, of course. Another article in November 14, 2025’s The Guardian, there’s this, by Nina Lakhani, their climate justice reporter: “Fossil fuel lobbyists outnumber all Cop30 delegations except Brazil, report says.”

Enough said?