Urban sprawl, pollution, over-consumption, deforestation like it or not, U.S. taxpayers are still paying for all of these things to occur in America and beyond. Despite recent investments in green jobs and technology, an array of government subsidies pay big dirty industries like oil, coal and factory farms to destroy the environment in every way possible while greener, healthier industries like solar power and vegetable farms get a pittance.

10. Highways

When gas prices rose dramatically in 2008, Americans began flocking to mass transit in droves, resulting in declining revenues for the Federal Highway Trust Fund. Naturally, the Bush Administration's response was to take money from already underfunded mass transit and use it to pay for highways that are already, as Slate put it, "paved with gold". Billions of dollars are pumped into the highway system every year, which encourages the polluting car culture and leads to further sprawl, while mass transit continues to fall by the wayside.

9. SUVs

In case you aren't already taking optimal advantage of the polluting power of our nation's sprawling web of highways, the government would like to make your impact even greater by setting you up in a nice gas-guzzling subsidized SUV. A portion of the tax code revised in 2003 gives business owners a huge deduction for up to 30% of a large vehicle's cost, which can add up to $25,000 in the case of a Hummer - far more than the credit given to individual purchasers of energy-efficient vehicles. Attempts to axe this provision in 2007 failed.

You only get the credit if it seats more than 9 passengers or weighs more than 14,000 pounds, but they don't really care whether your business actually requires such a vehicle. So, by all means, get the Escalade.

If you think reading that was difficult, imagine a small farmer trying to comply with it. While the House version directs FDA to consider the impact of its rule-making on small-scale farms, it contains no enforceable protections from inappropriate and burdensome rules. The FDA itself will decide what is "burdensome." What's more, if the FDA declares a particular food to be a "high risk" product, it can regulate all farms growing that product. So an E. coli outbreak in spinach from a large industrial farm could result in the FDA ruling that small organic farms cannot use manure to fertilize.  

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