823,475 Reasons Why Speaker Boehner Isn't Serious About Cutting Fossil Fuel Subsidies

Since 1999, House Speaker John Boehner has received $823,475 from coal and oil companies. Just saying.

You can see exactly what dirty energy companies are lining the pockets of his fine Italian suits, and how much they're giving, at the Dirty Energy Money site (which provides this information on all members of Congress, actually).

Boehner isn't the Representative most on the Big Oil and Coal dole, however. That distinction goes to Rick Boucher, the Democrat from Virginia, who has pulled in nearly half a million dollars in this session alone. All the data is officially reported and comes from the OpenSecrets.org database.

By the way, the Speaker put an absurdly biased and misleading "poll" up today on his Facebook page, asking for opinions about how to deal with gas prices. If you have a Facebook account, go check out the poll and ask Boehner to stop deceiving Americans.

Here's the comment that I left, if you need any inspiration:

Speaker Boehner,

Please look at the EIA’s latest projections—even that nonpartisan agency finds that the eventual gas price difference between tripling our offshore drilling production and never selling another offshore lease would only be $0.05/gallon, and not until 2030. A much more effective way, according to EIA, to lower gas prices is to focus on demand and make America’s auto fleet more fuel efficient. I laid it all out—with graphs!—here.

It’s worth noting that the EIA has always been awfully generous and biased towards oil—every year overestimating oil reserves and underestimating oil costs. Every year. That even they project such small price-per-gallon returns under even the most ambitious offshore drilling scenario is awfully telling.

I wish we could drill our way to lower gas prices. But the cold hard truths of physics and chemistry say that we cannot. Please, Speaker Boehner, help Americans understand the truth about gas prices and don’t subject them to this false debate. Doing so is just hurting our great nation.

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Big old tip of the hat to Solar Fred, one of the best solar wonks on Twitter.