Fossil fuel industry gets subsidies of $11m a minute, IMF finds | Hacker News Reader

Fossil fuel industry gets subsidies of $11m a minute, IMF finds

theguardian.com

Here is a seemingly quite better treatment of energy subsidies:

https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2021-07-22/fossil-fu...

About half comes from state’s funding state owned oil companies which is sort of questionable if it counts at all as a subsidy, a big chunk involves petro—states making their local energy very cheap, presumably to support their population who are otherwise very poor, Saudi Arabia is apparently the biggest in this regard.

Other subsides include energy assistance around the world for the poor. People might shout about ending oil subsidies, but are they really intending to include the programs that help poor people heat their homes in the winter?

It seems like there is a big gap between people wanting to end oil subsidies and actually knowing what is happening they want stopped, and as the above article shows, people are willing to believe arbitrary nonsense and call it a subsidy.

But how can you make a difference if you don’t even understand what you’re fighting against?

While politically popular, these "discounts for locals" schemes don't make much sense as poverty fighting measures. By their very nature, wealthy people will benefit more than the poor (a bigger home will consume more heat than a smaller home).

It would always be better to sell the commodity at market rate and just use the money to fund actual targeted poverty programs.

The broad programs are usually only in countries where the entire country is extremely poor: Venezuela isn’t going to benefit from “targeted” programs, they have a GDP problem.

In the more developed world there are programs like “free or reduced gas bills if your income is below the poverty line” etc.

Wealthy people also spend a much smaller percentage of their income on energy, so it depends how you look at it. A poor person is much more likely to notice energy costs going up despite using less energy.

>Explicit subsidies that cut fuel prices accounted for 8% of the total and tax breaks another 6%. The biggest factors were failing to make polluters pay for the deaths and poor health caused by air pollution (42%) and for the heatwaves and other impacts of global heating (29%).

I really don't like this "literally every bad thing we can put a price on is a subsidy" logic.

It really is an egregious lie. By this definition of subsidy, the government is also subsidizing your dog, since no-one is being taxed to pay for its methane emissions.

Redefining words to make a point is just a fancy way of lying. If they cared about the truth, the media would treat these liars the same as they treat the Dan Rathers of the world.

But when you think about it, the media derive a lot of their influence from their ability to freely navigate the space between 'telling the whole truth' and 'not lying'. So I suppose it's not surprising that they're happy to have the bar for 'truth' set as low as possible.

Is this now the fashion to blame the media by default? Subsidy is the exact term the study uses:

> This paper provides a comprehensive global, regional, and country-level update of: (i) efficient fossil fuel prices to reflect their full private and social costs; and (ii) subsidies implied by mispricing fuels

https://www.imf.org/en/Publications/WP/Issues/2021/09/23/Sti...

While it's a stretch to lump together all of the costs as subsidies -- maybe neglected externalities is the better term -- it is still important to call them out. Renewable or EV websites are often inundated with calls for ending subsidies for renewable energy, ignorant or not. They always conveniently forget the externalities of fossil-based energy, in no small part because of the lack of quantifiable cost. After all, if it isn't priced in, then the society has to shoulder it.

> Is this now the fashion to blame the media by default? Subsidy is the exact term the study uses:

Do you think the Guardian would run the honest version? Would it make the front page of HN?

Does it matter if we blame the chicken or the egg? The effect should more people like GP exposing that this isn’t real. Not that someone has to cover for the poor defenseless media that seemingly can never be held accountable for their part.

I think they might do more good saying fossil fuels have unpriced externalities of $11m/minute. Otherwise economically literate folk look at the headline and say not true while the others won't understand what they are on about.

The misuse of language and accounting is annoying because if prevents clear discussion and analysis of the problems in an area where that is important.

> Subsidy is the exact term the study uses

I'm saying that they intentionally misused the word to confuse readers.

The word subsidy has a specific and well known definition. A subsidy is a sum of money paid to an individual/organization/industry to achieve some goal. Or it is a tax break which is given specifically to an individual/organization/industry. The study uses subsidy to mean A hypothetical tax break given on a nonexistant tax, imagined by the authors, which would make companies pay for their externalities. Not a subsidy.

Imagine we levied a tax to right the wrongs of misinformation. Under this tax, the guardian would be paying billions, billions in damages for articles like this! But they're not paying my imaginary taxes. So the goverment is subsidizing the Guardian to the tune of billions of dollars. It's a friggin' fairy tale.

Further, the difference between the terms 'subsidy' and 'externality' is not trivial nor accidental. It's the difference between "your government is funneling money into industry x" (this message carries personal implications for the reader, making it likely to result in an emotional response) and "industry x harms the environment" (which is an old song and unlikely to generate an emotional response or reader engagement).

But you have to admit there is a line where it does make sense. Approaching this from a property rights point of view, no one has the right to encroach on your property. If a plant next door to you is reducing the air quality on your property, that is a violation of your rights.

Imagine that’s the case. There’s a plant next door to you which pumps very dangerous emissions into the air. The air you breath is now poisonous, and you die. The plant is (or should be) directly at fault for killing you. (Indeed, there are plenty of examples of factories that have done just this. Today, maybe killing less people, but definitely killing the surrounding ecosystem.)

Fossil fuels do this, just at a much larger scale with impacts that are less local and more global. In other words, it is harder for you to specifically identify how your rights were infringed because the impact is global instead of local, and it’s gradual. That’s why it’s hard to get people on board with these proposals.

But your rights are being violated nonetheless. What environmentally-conscious people want is for industry to stop polluting. Since slapping a law on everything saying “don’t pollute” is probably impossible, carbon pricing is an interesting alternative. It takes a free-market approach to making the externalities of a certain process matter to the company.

Since companies are focused only on profit, they won’t care if they’re polluting because it’s the cheapest option. But if it costs money to harm the environment, that should make the company “care” about the externalities.

Along with that, it should incentivize the market towards less-harmful solutions in a dynamic way. So the “externalities cost” is built into things like producing a solar panel. That way, everything competes on a level playing field instead of a politically charged one, or even one where companies aren’t accountable to their externalities.

"Explicit subsidies that cut fuel prices accounted for 8% of the total and tax breaks another 6%. The biggest factors were failing to make polluters pay for the deaths and poor health caused by air pollution (42%) and for the heatwaves and other impacts of global heating (29%)."

They estimate that globally, almost $6 trillion in subsidies are given to the fossil fuel industry. But aren't they miscalculating?

Venezuela for instance subsidizes their fuel at 2.5 cents per gallon. Who is the recipient of the subsidy in this case? Their state oil company or the citizens buying cheaper fuel?

Similarly with pollution. If one drives an F150 around town instead of a Prius, who is the recipient of the "cost of global warming" subsidy? It seems like it's the end user in both cases, not the drilling company.

If someone calls EV or Wind or Solar policies subsidies, people say "yes, its the right thing to do and makes economic sense". No one says "the money goes to the person buying the EV so its not an EV industry subsidy!"

But for some reason, people want to tie their logic up into pretzels to deny that oil companies are getting subsidies. Why?

I don't say that though.

Yeah, normally subsidies benefit both parties equally at the expense of tax-payers. But something like 75% of the world's oil production comes from state-run enterprises, the benefits go entirely to the consumer.

This is the relevant paper.

https://www.imf.org/en/Publications/WP/Issues/2021/09/23/Sti...

> The fossil fuel industry benefits from subsidies of $11m every minute, according to analysis by the International Monetary Fund.

OK but what kind of subsidies? I hear about ending "subsidies for oil" but it's never clear to me whether these are some type of explicit oil industry subsidy, or if they're just using standard tax deductions that every other large international business uses.

"The biggest factors were failing to make polluters pay for the deaths and poor health caused by air pollution (42%) and for the heatwaves and other impacts of global heating (29%)."

Well, fossil works and is known. Green will NOT WORK because of thermodynamics, inherent features and losses and the economic impacts of that. The only way is if EVERYONE accepts moving back to an 18th century quality of life. That's what the "Great Reset" actually will be if it's allowed to happen.

Does any one else get the feeling that many environmental pieces are just Chinese propaganda used for economic warfare?

In what way could an article about fuel subsidies be construed as Chinese propaganda?

The parent comment is saying that propaganda could be used as a weapon to demonize industries in an attempt to force regulation that would handicap US companies and make them less competitive.

In this scenario, the US has painful and ultimately pointless carbon taxes that give us the warm fuzzies but China continues building coal plants.

I would highly recommend you to read on the history of the cold War and mccarthyism specifically, because if you are trying to link such detached topics on abuse ways you are headed straight into it

On obtuse ways*

Autocorrect

But anyhow, IMF and World Bank are both themselves integral creations of BrettonWoods to ensure global USD supremacy, so to claim that reporting on the damage of externalized global warming is itself a "Chinese disinfo operation" is..... Quite the reach, not even two years ago we had the IMF work with the coup government of Bolivia to set up onerous loans to the country at disparate interest rates to quite literally shackle them into the infamous IMF debt cycle, so it can't even be argued that IMF is to this day an hegemonic institution

This is more than a little naive.

Think pragmatically and put yourself in the position of the Russians, Chinese. We are their opponent and there are no rules.

It is well documented that the Soviets were trying with great effort to influence US policy, politicians, and even citizens directly.

On related note, it is also well known that oil companies actively financed the anti-nuclear movement and pushed solar. This was incredibly successful in stopping new plants and increasing fissile fuel use.

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