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Of course, fossil fuels receive considerable direct and indirect subsidies This is the received wisdom of the clean energy movement, but every report I’ve read
by CountSessine 8y ago
Of course, fossil fuels receive considerable direct and indirect subsidies
This is the received wisdom of the clean energy movement, but every report I’ve read says otherwise. Oil and gas receive little if no operational subsidies in most countries and in fact are heavily taxed at every stage of exploitation. Even government investments in oil and gas typically return far better than the risk-free rate, which is remarkable for government.
Of course there are some terrible externalities that we don’t price in...
- joshuahaglund 8y agoI googled coal subsidy and this is the first result. There's a lot of tax credits and subsidies. "Clean coal" for instance, or 3.4 billion for carbon sequestration (did that get past the lab yet?) https://www.taxpayer.net/energy-natural-resources/coal-a-long-history-of-subsidies/ https://www.taxpayer.net/energy-natural-resources/coal-a-lon...
- CountSessine 8y agoCoal? Or oil and gas?
- Kaidera 8y agoSo even combining every possible subsidy given to the coal industry since 1950 they still only get a total of $72 billion of subsidies in present value. Given that coal's current contribution to GDP is ~$50 billion and the coal industry was larger in the past its pretty fair that the subsidies are completely insignificant and probably don't exceed 1% of the industry's economic value. So subsidies for coal are incredibly small.
- bilbo0s 8y ago>Of course there are some terrible externalities that we don’t price in... Like securing our energy interests in "difficult" parts of the world using an intelligence service so pricey that it's illegal for us to ask how pricey it is. (Along with a pricey military to go along with that intelligence service now that I think about it.)
- CountSessine 8y agoCome on. You and I know that America loves its army. You’d be doing this stuff even if it wasn’t to putter around in the Persian Gulf and supposedly make oil cheap (how’s that working out, BTW?) It’s already priced in.
- mikeash 8y agoDon’t forget the massive implicit subsidies they get in the form of dumping their pollution into our shared environment.
- CountSessine 8y ago...like the externalities I mentioned.
- mikeash 8y agoI must have missed that bit at the end. It doesn't make any sense to me to say they don't receive subsidies, then immediately afterward bring up the externalities. The fact that we allow them to continue creating those externalities is a huge subsidy.
- kilotaras 8y ago> Of course there are some terrible externalities that we don’t price in... I think it's past the point we started considering unpriced externalities as subsidies.