Energy Subsidies Exposed
Sep 23rd, 2009 by admin
Publicly funding climate change. from the Environmental Law Institute
Grist author David Roberts posted this excellent graphic from the Environmental Law Institute today which highlights the amount of subsidies given to fossil fuels vs. clean energy.
As David points out:
This report is actually quite conservative. It did not include any number of things that could be considered indirect or implicit subsidies. It didn’t include military spending to defend oil in the Middle East, spending on the electricity grid, or transportation spending. Those things don’t go exclusivelyto fossil fuels, but if there was a way of including the share that goes to fossil fuels, the fossil subsidy number would go way, way up. Infrastructure spending has more or less exclusively supported fossil fuels for decades now.
We would add that the long term environmental and health costs of destructive extractive methods like mountaintop removal are also absorbed by the government (via flood relief efforts, road and building repair and health care) and aren’t included in the subsidies of traditional fossil fuels outlined above. MACED and other groups have highlighted the externalized costs of coal.
