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I can understand where the oil company wants to deduct the cost of drilling a well. That's one of the tax breaks for oil companies - the subsidies - they get to deduct the cost of the well the year you drill.

First, the oil and gas business pays its fair share of taxes. Despite the current debate on energy taxes, few businesses pay more in taxes than oil and gas companies. The worldwide effective tax rate for our industry in 2010 was 40 percent. That's higher than the U.S. statutory rate of 35 percent and the rate for manufacturers of 26.5 percent.

Many have criticized a federal carbon tax, saying that it would increase energy costs. Some continue to oppose it even when that revenue would be used to reduce other taxes in what's known as a tax swap.

Along with Senator Lieberman and others, I introduced the Energy Security Bill to use existing technologies with a variety of tax incentives to reduce our dependence on oil.

The biggest tab the public picks up for fossil fuels has to do with what economists call 'external costs,' like the health effects of air and water pollution.

Subsidies are hugely important; they represent America's de facto energy policy.

For the U.S., I think we should have a carbon tax, for environmental reasons.

You can't turn on your television without seeing these advertisements about clean coal, clean tar sands and the claim that there's more jobs associated with fossil fuels than other industries. That's of course not true. But they're hammering that into the voters' heads.

National Democrats often try to pay for something with oil and gas taxes.

We all remember the BP oil disaster in the Gulf of Mexico, the worst oil spill in U.S. history. What is less well known is that BP is claiming a 9.9 billion tax deduction on the money they had to spend cleaning up their own mess and paying for damages they caused. That is absurd.