Fossil fuels being subsidised at rate of $13M a minute, says IMF | Hacker News Reader

Fossil fuels being subsidised at rate of $13M a minute, says IMF

theguardian.com

10 pointspera6 comments

So, what's the value of the economic activity enabled per minute?

And what is the cost/benefit of all this economic activity?

Implicit subsidies, which represent the “enormous” costs of the damage caused by fossil fuels through climate change and air pollution, made up 80% of the total.

makes it a little clickbait-y.

Just to clarify, implicit subsidies is defined as "undercharging for environmental costs and forgone consumption taxes", so I don't understand why you would call this "clickbait-y". For explicit subsidies it was $2.473.364 USD per minute in 2022.

because if you take into account any product there are implicit costs that aren't taken into account. Do you pay upfront for your health care costs when you eat a pizza.

I'm not saying they aren't right about the costs to society. just using it in the title seems like a stretch. why wouldn't the implicit benefits get taken into account. every person alive benefits from cheap energy, what would the economy look like if we shaved 1% or more of GDP off. especially when solar was $70/ per watt. would we even be able to make solar. Again, not saying we don't need to transition of fossil fuels.

If you exaggerate then the fossil fuel companies get to say your lying. And that you shouldn't be trusted. Click bait doesn't help the cause.

Unquote "enormous", plz.

There was some recent study which concluded that if all (externalized) costs to society were folded into the price of products, then basically all fossil-fuel enterprises would be unprofitable.

That's not even comparing against alternatives. Just [benefits - costs] expressed in $.

Of course one could argue a lot about the details of such a study. But... here we are in '23 with oil companies raking in record profits. And using those to pay dividend to shareholders + infrastructure investments to keep oil & gas flowing even longer. As opposed to investing that windfall into speeding up sustainable energy transition.

That's a 'bit' of a discrepancy, to put it mildly.

Only glimmer of hope I spotted is that exploration for new oil fields seems to be slowing down. In laymans terms: known reserves are big enough given CO2 budgets imposed by various climate accords. No need to explore eg. the Arctic any further.

Expect a lot of currently known fossil reserves to remain in the ground, even if (ignoring externalized costs) pumping those up would appear profitable.

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