To Subsidize or Not to Subsidize?

I personally feel that the oil companies should not receive any more tax breaks or subsidies from the American government or any government for that matter. The oil companies are already a highly profitable industry, and the market for oil does not appear to be dying down any time soon. I am not quite sure, why tax breaks and subsidies are given to oil and coal companies, I can only assumed that it is because at one time they were seen as not having an advantage on the world market that has since changed. And since oil and coal companies now dominate the world market there is not further need to subsidies them.
The same cannot be said about other energy sectors, especially the renewable energy sector. The government should provide tax breaks for these industries at least until they can get their footing. Obama in his State of the Union Address stated that more jobs should be created in the renewable energy fields and in green jobs, but no one wants to privately start up these companies because there are high setup cost with no guarantee for returns, so one of the only ways to get these jobs started is to subsidies and provide tax breaks for them.
The flaw in this, however, is that no one is going to want to subsidies these industries once they are well off, this is to say that the renewable energy market gets off the ground. This is the major problem when the government steps in to subsidies any industry. Once the industry is up and running and no longer needs the help and the money, the government faces opposition from the industry for trying to cut back the tax breaks and subsidies. But with this aside if one of the current goals of this government is to get sustainable energy moving forward then, I feel that they should provide start up money to these industries. Michael Levi, the energy and climate change analyst, at the Council of Foreign Relations, makes and interesting point when he states, “But an effort to eliminate all energy subsidies without instituting better alternative policies should be understood for what it is: a recipe for cementing the dominance of additional fossil fuels against their competitors (Broder, NYT).” That statement is true if the government did not help support these industries the current energy companies such as oil and coal would continue to have the market advantage since all of their start up endeavors have already been laid down and they are at a point of making a return.
So what should our government do? In my opinion they should stop listening to oil and coal lobbyist and put the money they would have been provided to these industries into renewable energy sources. That way no new money is needed, it is just redirected into another industry.