With war in Ukraine threatening European and even American oil supplies, many nations are scrambling to develop and deploy cleaner sources of energy. That’s where the U. S. Department of Energy may have a large part in backing big money for battery research. $3.1 billion in funding from the Infrastructure Investment and Jobs Act (IIJA), “will support the creation of new, retrofitted, and expanded commercial facilities as well as manufacturing demonstrations and battery recycling.” Batteries get Billions, Big Oil Gets Trillions One sometimes wonders why the governments of the world subsidize Big Oil as much as they do. Big Oil has created the wealthiest corporations since the Roman Empire. First-world nations spend a tremendous amount of their wealth in extracting, refining, shipping and consuming these often dirty fuels. Bill McKibben recently wrote, “…almost half of what we move around the seas is not finished products (cars) nor even the raw materials to make them (steel), but simply the stuff that …