The World Blows over $5T a Year on Oil and Gas Subsidies: Report

That is an incredibly misleading definition, to the point the term loses all meaning. It would be more honest to say "by not accounting for all negative externalities".

Agreed. I think externalities need to be accounted for, but regardless, intentionally using misleading language "for the right cause" is never justified imho.

Even if we counted it as subsidies, the calculation would still be complete bogus, or "controversial" as the paper puts it.

It goes like this: Take the "excess death" figure from the WHO (already a questionable number) and multiply it by the "economic value" of that person. That would be two million dollars for an Australian, $300,000 for a Chinese person and still about a $100,000 for someone from Tanzania.

In other words, we're not assuming those excess deaths are the old and sickly who eventually succumb to a lifetime of pollution, but the young and healthy who have decades worth of earnings ahead of them.

and that 4.2 Million people doesn't include the 7 Billion people in the world that need fossil fuels in order to have power. Cars, buildings etc. Because of fossil fuels, life has been much better for the 7 billion.

People don't die "due to fossil fuel pollution", but rather "air pollution contributes to their mortality" (according to your source).

There's a lot of things that contribute to mortality, sitting in front of a computer screen and writing HN comments being one of them.

Attributing these deaths to pollution is a statistical cherrypick.

How is the effect different? It's a cost that the private company should be paying, but is not.

EDIT - if your comment is pointing out that these things are techincaly different words/phrases, then ok. However, to me, that doesn't make for good discussion: talking about the effects and results, and not fighting about term meanings in the trenches, leads to points of productive conversation.

If a town allowed a restaurant to dump their trash in a public park for free, would you consider that a subsidy?