Hacker News Reader

Comment by mtgx | Hacker News Reader

The very least the governments can do is eliminate all subsidies to coal, oil and natural gas. They've had them for decades. I don't think it's healthy for a society to prop up an industry that long with subsidies, especially when it's one of the most profitable.

View on HN

Australia had a carbon tax. Unfortunately it has been reverted. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Carbon_pricing_in_Australia

Especially when those industries are killing us. Imagine government subsidies of cigarettes or heroin.

A politician can make any kind of spending seem bad by just calling it a subsidy regardless of the social benefit. But when it benefits people they like it can just be quietly ignored.

The real test should be if it ensures that people pay a "fair price" for a product. Paying a little more for clean energy is perfectly reasonable.

> The real test should be if it ensures that people pay a "fair price" for a product. Paying a little more for clean energy is perfectly reasonable.

You could argue the other way and say that paying a little more for dirty energy is perfectly reasonable because someone has to come after them to clean things up. There is a cost to that.

Price manipulation in the market in any direction will end up providing an edge for someone to extract value / reduce the fairness to consumers.

Outside of very short term smoothing effects from strategic reserves, "fair price" raises some troubling price-fixing flags, for me.

Could you list the subsidies you're against? All I ever find is general business items or for non-conventional fuels.

This isn't what people normally mean when they refer to subsidies, but the fact that fossil fuel users are allowed to contaminate everyone's air is effectively a massive subsidy for their operations. If the cost of the CO2 and pollution were paid by those producing it, this stuff would be way more expensive.

The IMF recently published a working paper[1] on energy subsidies at global and regional levels that might be of interest. They do use an fairly broad definition of what counts as a subsidy (including cost of damages environmental damages and global warming effect of CO2 emissions).

[1] http://www.imf.org/external/pubs/cat/longres.aspx?sk=42940.0

http://www.theguardian.com/environment/2015/may/18/fossil-fu...

Reply on news.ycombinator.com