this post was submitted on 20 Sep 2023
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The number is kind of misleading. There's about $1-2T of direct subsidies, with the remainder being uncharged externalities (remediating environmental damage, etc) that's paid for later with public funds. I'm not sure how they come up with those numbers, but if they really wanted to count externalities, the number should be orders of magnitude higher, like what's the cost of actually removing that fucking carbon from the atmosphere, how do you price the inevitable mass starvation and collapse of industrial civilization, etc.
$1-2 T vs $7T honestly makes no difference in my mind. That's still an absolutely astounding amount of free money being given to billion dollar companies instead of people that actually need it
Okay, but this money basically IS going to people that need it, by way of affordable fuel prices. Ever wonder why fuel is so cheap in places like Egypt? It's because the government is subsidizing the cost and picking up a lot of the tab. What happens when people can no longer afford to get around, and food prices skyrocket because transportation is so expensive? Leaders are mostly concerned with keeping their heads attached to their bodies and they'll do anything to keep the economy growing, even if it destroys the environment and explodes the public debt. It's why climate change is such a gnarly problem, it's not just that there's a bunch of corrupt evil people preventing progress, our whole economic system needs to be overturned.
For a livable future, we're going to have to massively reduce our energy usage (like, yesterday) and figure out how to survive in a degrowth scenario, while we try to replace the entirety of our infrastructure and build out resilient systems, all without access to credit. Fun times ahead.
there is also things like tax exemptions for fossil fuels, where other energy carriers are taxed. For instance airplane kerosine is not taxed in Europe. Diesel has a tax exemption over gasoline in Germany that is worth 60 Billion annualy. These are neither direct subsidies nor externalities, but favor fossil fuels over other systems.