Stacking the Deck

Obama and Clinton dueled over the 2005 energy bill, but Clinton once again painted a false picture of what the measure contained. She continued to repeat her misleading claim that it had "enormous giveaways to the oil and gas industries," when in fact it resulted in a net increase in taxes on oil and gas companies.

    Clinton: Well, Tim, I think it's well accepted that the 2005 energy bill was the Dick Cheney lobbyist energy bill. It was written by lobbyists. It was championed by Dick Cheney. It wasn't just the green light that it gave to more nuclear power. It had enormous giveaways to the oil and gas industries. ... It was the wrong policy for America. It was so heavily tilted toward the special interests that many of us, at the time, said, you know, that's not going to move us on the path we need, which is toward clean, renewable green energy.

hillThis is the third time we've pointed out Clinton's distortion of this legislation. She is continuing a bogus line of attack that we debunked when Democrats deployed it widely in the 2006 congressional elections. While it's true that Republican lawmakers had once considered large tax breaks for oil and gas companies in the bill, the biggest of them had been stripped out of the bill by the time it passed.

Once again, it's true that the Energy Policy Act of 2005 contained $14.3 billion in tax breaks, but most of them weren't for the oil and gas industry. They went mainly to electric utilities for such things as incentives for new transmission lines and "clean coal" facilities, and also for incentives for alternative fuels research and subsidies for energy efficient cars and homes.

According to the nonpartisan Congressional Research Service, the bill did give $2.6 billion in tax breaks for oil companies, but what Clinton fails to acknowledge is that those breaks were more than offset by $2.9 billion in tax increases. The net result was a $300 million tax increase over 11 years on oil and gas companies.

Obama was closer to the truth when he said the 2005 bill (which he supported) was "the largest investment in clean energy ... that we had ever seen."

    Obama: Well, the reason I voted for it [the 2005 energy bill] was because it was the single largest investment in clean energy – solar, wind, biodiesel – that we had ever seen. And I think it is – we talked about this earlier – if we are going to deal with our dependence on foreign oil, then we're going to have to ramp up how we're producing energy here in the United States.

We don't know offhand whether there have been bigger tax breaks for clean energy in the past, but the 2005 bill certainly contained a lot of incentives aimed at clean energy and conservation. At the time the bill was being considered, the nonpartisan Joint Committee on Taxation estimated that it included $1.6 billion for "clean coal" facilities and $1.3 billion in incentives for alternative fuels such as biodiesel and incentives for buying alternative vehicles in the form of a tax credit. The bill also contained just under $1.3 billion for energy conservation incentives, including tax credits for homeowners who install certain energy-saving equipment or businesses that install stationary microturbine power plants.

Obama's Energy Contradiction