Not necessarily. Lots of people have jobs in coal, oil and gas production, and those constituencies will often vote for politicians who promise to keep those jobs around. They can do this through heavily subsidizing the cost of fossil fuels (which they currently do) in order to reduce the extent to which the economic benefits of clean energy can influence the market.
In the long term, they probably can't keep this up, but we don't really have a "long term" anymore.
Funny you mention study, because that's what people do in university and college, but in America they get a fat student loan when they graduate...
But how does that relate to a 440,000€/job/year subsidy? On paper it seems wasteful but I'm no expert in the economics of propping up the aluminium industry in Germany. Maybe it's a strategic move for national defence.
Mostly it is tax deductions. Everybody is getting tax deductions. Everybody from your local hair salon to Microsoft is taking tax deductions. For the fuel companies this includes income tax, fees for shipping, and royalties for extracting the resources. The only really offensive one is a deduction for BP's punishment, which sort of undoes the punishment... though that is fair if the tobacco companies got to do likewise for their punishment.
The rest is just the unpaid share of the cost of running various government agencies. First of all this isn't generally something the companies feel they benefit from; ditching OSHA/EPA/etc. would probably please them. Second of all, again it is something we do for all American businesses.
As with any other American businesses, wind and solar providers get the subsidies. They also get special environmental subsidies, which are huge.
I think this dispute started because the abnormal subsidies being provided to wind/solar providers have become a political issue. The wind/solar providers respond by pushing the narrative that fossil fuels get subsidies, but that just isn't a reasonable conclusion. The supposed subsidies are just normal things provided to American businesses, unlike what wind and solar are getting.
If the US gasoline costs were even close to EU levels, (say, 2x what we pay), there'd be an inversion in household energy consumption economics (and it'd be the difference between 2% and 5% of household incomes). EVs wouldn't be just for tree-huggers. Buying from 100% clean electrical sources might be cheaper than "standard" sources.
Other places, like the EU, don't have all that. They also apply some really extreme taxes. Lack of punitive taxes isn't a subsidy. If the taxes are never imposed in the first place, it isn't even a tax credit.
The average gasoline tax in the US is $0.53 per gallon total, combining all taxes. Just the excise tax in Turkey is $4.32 per gallon!!! The average gasoline-specific tax in the 34 advanced economies is $2.62 per gallon, but then a VAT is applied on top of that.
If we allowed a restaurant to dump its trash for free in a public playground, we would be subsidizing that restaurant with taxpayer dollars.
When we allow fossil fuels to be burned and dump pollution for free into the public atmosphere, we are subsidizing the usage of fossil fuel.
In the trash scenario, we'd make the restaurant pay for cleanup, pay medical costs for the kids who got ill, and pay for its future trash disposal. Burning fossil fuels causes asthma, climate change, flooding, etc, and remediation costs should be borne by those who cause the damage.
If you consider the billions of dollars we all spend dealing with fossil fuel companies' waste, it's quite a subsidy. The least we can do is make them compete on a level playing field.
Lobbyists will be the death of us all.
Not necessarily... it depends on if it's actually cheaper, or just fake government-subsidized cheaper. Sure, you'll get companies milking government subsidies for all they are worth while they last, but if solar isn't actually cheaper than coal, "the market" isn't going to switch.
Not necessarily.. in the UK I've lots of good ideas get ditched early on because they're allegedly "not a good fit", or "uneconomic". What I suspect that really means in many cases is that someone in government or their family has a vested interest in a technology that this would replace, and it gets ditched. As long as we have elected "representatives" like this, nothing will change.
Two problems.
First, progressive switching is slower than needed to even decelerate warming. The system already has enormous momentum and it cannot be arrested easily and with gentle measures.
Second, technological path dependency is extremely strong. Historically the kinds of jolts to move from one systemic technological optimum to another (eg steam-rail-telegram to oil-road-radio) have been enormous. Wars and depressions, mostly. It would be nice to avoid these.
Since climate models are certainly not as accurate as we would like them to be, this is hard to say.
Second, progressive switching can be really, really fast. Look how fast people moved away from feature phones to smartphones. Complete conversion within a decade. Energy production carries more lag but still, progressive does not mean slow. When options are more attractive economically it will be a landslide.
Tech improvememt is certainly not linked to war. Look at all the tech progress we made in so many areas in the past 60 years without any major conflict happening. There is no rationale for progress to be dependent on conflict, at least it is not a model that explains anything anymore.
They don't have to be very accurate at this point. Matter is conserved, including atmospheric CO2. It takes time to put in, it takes time to get out. Given that the only "out" right now is natural processes, it will take decades for CO2 to return to previous levels even if emissions dropped to zero instantly.
Underestimation of momentum is also true for capital-intensive shifts in dominant technology mixes. These shifts do not happen overnight; capital plant and equipment has substantial lags for decision time, financing, construction and onlining. These lags are going to vary by region, industry and technology. That adds substantially to overall reaction time under the just-let-it-ride scenario.
Misunderstanding the effects of accumulation is normal: http://web.mit.edu/jsterman/www/CroninGonzalezSterman061210....
Markets can and do dynamically adapt to circumstances, supply shocks, technological change so on. But they do not tend to overcome path dependency (we're all using QWERTY and standard gauge rail for no reason other than that's what locked in) and they do not have magical powers to ignore physics.
We are all using QWERTY because it's not bad. You could switch to anything else and it would not be so much better. It's a local maxima that is good enough and it happened for historical reasons.
Most people are not held down by the keyboard setting. They don't need to type faster, and if they did, they would need to think faster first - it's not the tool that is the bottleneck in this particular case.
That's my exact point. It's textbook path dependency.