@masterdon1312 political donations to PACs- the reason elected officials on both sides remain silent on the practice of subsidizing wealthy oil and gas companies in spite of the known harms to your kids future.
We can thank mainly #republicans for the #rightwing #SCOTUS majority approving Citizens United
-- and the public who stayed home and didn't bother to vote in prior elections. George Carlin was funny and spot on often - but dead wrong about the futility of #voting.
@lymphomation @masterdon1312
Thankfully, explicit subsidies to the fossil fuel industry is one of the areas in which the USA is one of the countries that is pretty much innocent of it.
There are still too many implicit subsidies, but hopefully if Americans keep voting out the fossil fools like they've started doing in 2018 we'll be able to put a #PriceOnPolluton next year so that we can start taxing the fossil fuels at the wellhead, mines and ports.
From IMF New Report on Fossil Fuel Subsidies
@GreenFire @masterdon1312
Thank you. Interesting; hopefully useful for advocates.
This paper provides a comprehensive global, regional, and country-level update of: (i) efficient fossil fuel prices to reflect supply and environmental costs; and (ii) subsidies implied by charging below efficient fuel prices. Globally, fossil fuel subsidies were $7 trillion in 2022 or 7.1 percent of GDP. Explicit subsidies (undercharging for supply costs) have more than doubled since 2020 but are still only 18 percent of the total subsidy, while nearly 60 percent is due to undercharging for global warming and local air pollution. Differences between efficient prices and retail fuel prices are large and pervasive, for example, 80 percent of global coal consumption was priced at below half of its efficient level in 2022. Full fossil fuel price reform would reduce global carbon dioxide emissions to an estimated 43 percent below baseline levels in 2030 (in line with keeping global warming to 1.5-2oC), while raising revenues worth 3.6 percent of global GDP and preventing 1.6 million local air pollution deaths per year. Accompanying spreadsheets provide detailed results for 170 countries.
Karl Schwartz, Artist advocate
Kevin Leecaster