If you are of a particular frame of mind, it is fashionable these days to call for renewable energy subsidies to be cut \/ phased out \/ stopped (according to taste). \u00a0They are, after all, inflating our tax and electricity bills \u2013 and then there are all those unsightly turbines and solar farms be-spoiling our green and pleasant back-yards. \u00a0Subsidies for nuclear power get an easier ride, probably because no one really understands them \u2013 including, I suspect, those smart folk in the Department of Energy and Climate Change.<\/p>\n
Fewer\u00a0currently call for the abolition of subsidies on fossil fuel use \u2013 although the IMF<\/a> is starting to. \u00a0The Guardian<\/a> ran a story last week with the headline: \"G20 countries pay over $1,000 per citizen in fossil fuel subsidies, says IMF<\/em>\".<\/p>\n The IMF's estimate of the level of global\u00a0fossil fuel subsidies is $5.3tn a year. \u00a0It calculates that ending these would slash global carbon emissions by 20%. \u00a0Whilst much of these\u00a0subsidies include direct payments, taxbreaks and cheap\u00a0fuel (particularly in the petroleum-rentier states), the Guardian says that the largest part is the costs left unpaid by polluters and picked up by taxpayers, and include the impacts of local air pollution and floods, droughts and storms being driven by climate change \u2013 so-called externalities. \u00a0In the UK, these cost the NHS \"billions\", or so 'tis said.<\/p>\n One way (maybe the only effective way) of dealing with such externality costs is through a robust carbon tax, a policy favoured by the Economist. \u00a0See this<\/a>, and this<\/a>. \u00a0It would be opposed, equally robustly, by vested interests of all kinds. \u00a0Using it to replace part of VAT would be one way of\u00a0easing the pain. \u00a0Finally, the Guardian piece ends with a stunning graphic which shows how much gas has been burned since you loaded the page. \u00a0I got to 50million cubic metres in a short time before I gave up in something close to\u00a0despair.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":" If you are of a particular frame of mind, it is fashionable these days to call for renewable energy subsidies to be cut \/ phased out \/ stopped (according to taste). \u00a0They are, after all, inflating our tax and electricity...<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":237,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_acf_changed":false,"footnotes":"","jetpack_post_was_ever_published":false},"categories":[2,4],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-6414","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-comment","category-news-and-updates"],"acf":[],"jetpack_featured_media_url":"","jetpack-related-posts":[],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/blogs.bath.ac.uk\/edswahs\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/6414","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/blogs.bath.ac.uk\/edswahs\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/blogs.bath.ac.uk\/edswahs\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/blogs.bath.ac.uk\/edswahs\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/237"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/blogs.bath.ac.uk\/edswahs\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=6414"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/blogs.bath.ac.uk\/edswahs\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/6414\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/blogs.bath.ac.uk\/edswahs\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=6414"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/blogs.bath.ac.uk\/edswahs\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=6414"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/blogs.bath.ac.uk\/edswahs\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=6414"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}