While the anti-wind crowd hyperventilates over the wrath offshore turbines will allegedly unleash, the domestic terrorists who have infested Washington, D.C., are trying to kill us by spewing fake science, endowing the status quo, and sabotaging any alternative that lessens our consumption of poisons and disease.

As the Mad King relentlessly distracts us by murdering civilians in international waters, worshiping an individual who spread hate and bigotry, and running a criminal enterprise, his regime has added nearly $40 billion in new federal subsidies for oil, gas, and coal.

A recently released report found White House fascists are sending an additional $4 billion of taxpayer money each year for the next decade to the fossil fuel industry. That boondoggle, created by the July 4 passage of the big, ugly bill, adds to $30.8 billion a year in preexisting subsidies for the polluting industry.

The report, titled “Paying for Climate Chaos: U.S. Federal Subsidies to Fossil Fuel Production,” reveals the staggering scope of federal government subsidies for fossil fuel extraction and burning. While many of us struggle with the rising cost of housing, groceries, and utilities, the regime is giving Big Oil an estimated $34.8 billion annually, further enriching those who helped the Mad King get reelected.

Those behind the 36-page report, Oil Change International, noted that figure is a “conservative estimate and likely much higher, due to a lack of accessible, reliable data.” They also noted it “excludes tens of billions of annual state, county, and municipal subsidies for fossil fuel production as well as federal support in the form of international public finance, military expenditures to protect fossil fuel supply or markets, or environmental and health costs of fossil fuel pollution.”

Fossil fuel corporations, which spend millions annually “to rig our political system in their favor, receive a 30,000% return on investment in the forms of tax breaks, direct appropriations, cheap access to public lands, and other handouts from the federal government,” according to Oil Change International.

Collin Rees, the U.S. program manager for Oil Change International and the author of the report, said the taxpayer-funded raise amounts to “the largest single-year increase in subsidies we’ve seen in many years — at least since 2017.” The Mad King was just beginning his first reign of terror then.

The United States has been subsidizing the fossil fuel industry for two-plus centuries. Many of the tax subsidies highlighted in the report, including a tax break passed in 1913 that allows Big Oil to write off large amounts of expenses related to drilling new wells, have been on the books for decades.

These subsidies began as early as the 1780s, and have taken various forms, such as tax deductions, protective tariffs, and royalty-free land leases. They’re notoriously difficult to uncouple.

The local anti-wind crowd doesn’t care, because the dirty, climate-changing fossil fuels that power their lives aren’t extracted and burned near their expensive coastal compounds.

While taxpayers fund their own demise, 55 heat waves over the past quarter-century wouldn’t have happened without human-caused climate change, according to a study published this month.

Planet-warming emissions from 180 major cement, oil, and methane producers contributed significantly to all of the heat events considered in the study. The researchers examined 213 heat waves from 2000 to 2023. The polluters examined in the study include publicly traded and state-owned companies, as well several countries where fossil fuel production data was available at the national level.

Collectively, these producers are responsible for 57% of all the carbon dioxide that was emitted from 1850 to 2023, according to the study.

Another study published this month found that the smallest and most abundant phytoplankton on Earth (Prochlorococcus), which forms the foundation of the marine food web and helps regulate the planet’s climate, will decline sharply as the ocean boils.

Prochlorococcus populations could shrink by as much as half in tropical oceans over the next 75 years if surface waters exceed about 82 degrees Fahrenheit, according to the study. Many tropical and subtropical sea surface temperatures are already trending above average and are projected to regularly surpass 86 degrees over the next seven-plus decades.

Despite overwhelming scientific evidence, and some common sense, that shows the burning of fossil fuels is destroying the planetary system that allows humans to thrive, the Mad King and his army of Christian nationalists are determined to enrich themselves and make as many people as possible suffer.

At the United Nations in New York City this week the Mad King — who 15 years ago signed on to a full page ad in The New York Times that demanded more climate action from President Obama — offered this intellectual nugget:

“And if you add coal, we have the most of any nation in the world. Clean. I call it clean, beautiful coal. You can do things today with coal that you couldn’t have done 10 years ago, 15 years. So I have a little standing order in the White House. Never use the word coal, only use the words clean, beautiful coal. Sounds much better, doesn’t it?”

No wonder Bill McKibben called the Mad King’s rant the “dumbest speech” in U.N. history.

The regime recently canceled grants for street safety measures, pedestrian paths, and bicycle lanes in communities around the country, each time offering the same ignorant reason for rescinding federal funds: the projects aren’t designed for cars.

A San Diego County road improvement project that included bike lanes “appears to reduce lane capacity and a road diet that is hostile to motor vehicles,” a U.S. Department of Transportation official wrote in canceling a $1.2 million grant the agency awarded a year ago.

Officials in Boston received a similar explanation when the regime yanked back a previously awarded grant to improve walking, bicycling, and public transit in the city’s Mattapan Square neighborhood in a way that would change the car-centric configuration. Another grant to improve safety at intersections in the city was terminated, because the regime said it could “impede vehicle capacity and speed.”

The Fossil Fuel Kraken was unchained centuries ago. It has gotten bigger and stronger since then. The terrorist in the Oval Office is overfeeding it, and the petty ghouls in his regime think it’s awesome. We should be terrified.

Frank Carini can be reached at [email protected]. His opinions don’t reflect those of ecoRI News.