I'm generally in favour of allowing the market to do its work. That said, in the case of emissions, it is too expensive to attribute and process torts, so the true cost of emissions is rarely ever passed on to even very large polluters who have damaged a lot of property. This is why the original mandate of the EPA is so legitimate.
The market doesn't care about external costs, you're right.
One thing to keep in mind though is that we may be nearing the time in which the market could handle this because renewables are getting very cheap. I'm not sure if we're at the point where if you dropped all oil subsidies that renewables would be cheaper (maybe not? I haven't done the math) but we should be getting close if we're not already there. At that point the market could, in theory, move to the one with the higher profit margins while still not caring about external costs.
If I run a paint factory and all my competitors have to pay to to have their toxic waste hauled away and properly disposed of, but the taxpayer foots the bill for disposing my waste, that sounds like a subsidy to me.
Does it cease to be a subsidy if I'm dumping the waste in a river and the government is hauling it away from there, rather than collecting it at the factory gate?
Seems to me anyone who's opposed to government subsidies would also be opposed to profiting from negative externalities.
It’s a ballsy move to compare the oil and gas industries to health. There is plenty to criticise about the way the US healthcare system is run, but do people really begrudge treating the two industries differently?
Yes, I do begrudge the dickens out of people who insist that being able to deduct oil exploration costs is an unfair "subsidy" to oil and whose removal would instantly turbocharge renewables by itself.
Letting companies deduct expenses like everyone else is not a subsidy.
It's like it's become part of the common mythos, that US oil companies get massive cash subsidies that are the sole reason they're not beaten by renewables, but the moment you apply any scrutiny it falls apart.
(Environmental concerns are legit, but the lack of better regulation is a non-standard usage of "subsidy" and people go further to claim that tax-deductions-everyone-gets are subsidies.)