The Politics of Fossil-Fuel Subsidies

A comprehensive assessment of global fossil-fuel subsidies has found that “governments are spending $500 billion annually on policies that undermine energy security and worsen the environment.”


“As the US moves to open up more deep water areas for oil exploration and companies prepare to open up deep reserves off the coast of Brazil and Angola,” The Christian Science Monitor tells us: “Up to 7,400 barrels of crude oil a day could be spewing into the depths of the Gulf of Mexico after Tuesday night’s explosion aboard the semi-submersible Transocean Deepwater Horizon rig caused it to capsize and sink Thursday morning.”

In the United States, there is no better sign of Politics As Usual in the service of BAUAAAE (Business As Usual And Above All Else) than the high status of coal in legislation that both House and Senate climate have proposed. Even as the warnings become more severe about such wicked disregard for future survival of life on the planet as we know it, our ear-tagged Congress critters will pass some version of the continuing, clean coal scam.

Ongoing denial at a federal level is about corruption and not conviction. As Senator Sanders recently chastened:

There is no serious dispute within the scientific community and in peer-reviewed journals that global warming is real and that it is significantly caused by anthropogenic greenhouse gas emissions. Virtually the only people who disagree with this conclusion are representatives of the oil and coal companies, their apologists in the media and those on Capitol Hill who are stubborn defenders of their big polluter patrons.

Yet even with such admission, there is every expectation that such friends in rich places behavior will continue despite repeated warnings that use of coal will result in irreversible, catastrophic heating of the planet. As this blog has cautioned, it is not what climate catastrophe this legislation could mitigate. The concern is how much further harm it will do a system already undergoing drastic change from excessive human-caused emissions.

Continue reading here: Toronto Now Using Serial Hybrid Buses

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