enjoy:

Fossil fuel subsidies are a staggering $5 tn per year

A new study finds 6.5% of global GDP goes to subsidizing dirty fossil fuels

https://www.theguardian.com/environm...-5-tn-per-year

A study was just published in the journal World Development that quantifies the amount of subsidies directed toward fossil fuels globally, and the results are shocking. The authors work at the IMF and are well-skilled to quantify the subsidies discussed in the paper.

Let’s give the final numbers and then back up to dig into the details. The subsidies were $4.9 tn in 2013 and they rose to $5.3 tn just two years later. According to the authors, these subsidies are important because first, they promote fossil fuel use which damages the environment. Second, these are fiscally costly. Third, the subsidies discourage investments in energy efficiency and renewable energy that compete with the subsidized fossil fuels. Finally, subsidies are very inefficient means to support low-income households.

With these truths made plain, why haven’t subsidies been eliminated?

Now, we all understand how conservatives insist the pollution that their pet industry creates is always "someone else's problem," but the fact of the matter is ... pollution definitely costs. This report factors in the environmental effects of harvesting oil/coal/gas, and with good reason. But even if you take pollution costs out of the equation, the industry still receives subsidy that dwarfs "welfare programs" cons whine about. The soulless among us rant, daily, about how the richest nation in the world taking care of its sick and destitute is the single greatest "drag" on our economy. Oops, nope. Not even close.

Throw in the Pentagon and unethical surveillance budgets every year (largely to secure the global oil delivery system), and it truly is a mountains vs. molehills argument they're trying to pass off. Now, sure, cons will desperately attempt to tilt the scale by including Medicare and Medicaid and Social Security in the numbers, even though they are elements of mandatory spending. But even if you're allowed to include mandatory health subsidy, your total "welfare program" spending still doesn't come close to the amount of subsidy the oil paradigm receives.

I propose that every subsequent butthurt display by our resident Ayn Rand cultists here be reminded of this reality. Your false equivalency is fooling absolutely no one. If we shifted even half of the $6 trillion the world spends on fossil fuel subsidy and military/spying apparatus to renewables expansion, how much better off would humanity and the planet be?

didn't your mother teach you that two wrongs don't make a right

Didn't your mother teach you to try to correct wrongs when you see them?

It's only $5 Trillion? I figured it would be a Kabillion or Gajillion! $5 Trillion ain't no thang. Or perhaps a Google Dollars?

That's elite-level mooching,

Peak oil?

http://www.sciencedirect.com/science...05750X16304867 Hurray $19 paywall for however that is calculated.

All right, so they're saying that the US is subsidizing 600 billion a year of fossil fuel and about half of that is air pollution externalities (not including global warming, which are about 125 billion). OK, so 300 billion dollars each year of air pollution externalities from fossil fuel use? Roughly 1000 dollars worth of harm of air pollution for each man, woman, and child in the US, every year? How in the world do they come up with that figure? Seems, uh, dubious.

And China subsidized fossil fuels to the tune of 1.8 trillion? That's 16% of their GDP!!!

Hey! Stop looking behind the curtain. Don't you know this is going to cost us a KAJILLION dollars (Venezuelan Bolivars to be exact, but it's a KAJILLION!). Stop it with your logic and questioning.