Scrapping Fossil-Fuel Subsidies Would Get Us Halfway There on Climate Change

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January 23, 2012

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by Ezra Klein, Brad Plumer (The Washington Post) …In 2010, the world spent $409 billion on fossil-fuel subsidies to artificially lower the price of coal, gas and oil. Eliminating those subsidies would curb fuel use and lead to half the emissions cuts necessary to avoid 2°C of warming.

That’s all according to Fatih Birol, chief economist at the International Energy Agency. The Guardian’s Datablog supplies the chart. By Birol’s calculations, scrapping all subsidies for fossil-fuel consumption would avoid 2.56 gigatons of carbon-dioxide per year by 2035 — or about 70 percent of what the European Union currently emits. That could provide almost half of the extra cuts the world needs to stay within its carbon budget:

…Governments in Iran, Saudi Arabia, Egypt, Venezuela, Indonesia and elsewhere all spend money to reduce the price of gasoline at the pump, which in turn encourages higher oil use. Other nations, like Russia, offer natural-gas discounts for heating. China spends $2 billion per year to promote coal-burning. And so on.

Such subsidies are frequently touted as poverty-assistance measures, but they’re not particularly effective at that task — as Birol observed, the poorest 20 percent of the population in these countries received just 8 percent of the benefits. READ MORE and MORE (The Guardian)

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