Ecology topic

[Fake Messiah]

For all of the people who claim how oil and gas are cheap, think again:

A new report says that the world subsidized fossil fuels by $5.2 trillion in just one year.

The International Monetary Fund recently updated its comprehensive report on global fossil-fuel subsidies. It arrives at a staggering conclusion: In 2017, the world subsidized fossil fuels by $5.2 trillion, equal to roughly 6.5 percent of global GDP. That’s up half a trillion dollars from 2015, when global subsidies stood at $4.7 trillion, according to the IMF. If governments had only accounted for these subsidies and priced fossil fuels at their “fully efficient levels” in 2015, then worldwide carbon emissions would have been 28 percent lower, and deaths due to toxic air pollution 46 percent lower.

The report suggests a morally grim situation: As the planet careens toward climate catastrophe, governments are forking over trillions of dollars—one-fifteenth of the global economy!—directly to oil, coal, and gas companies. But the challenge of combatting climate change through politics is much more difficult than some tidy math can make it seem. This calculation suggests that recalibration would be simple. If we only cut those subsidies, then carbon pollution would plunge, and we’d be much further along in addressing the climate challenge.

The burning of fossil fuels demands the grant of something valuable not from one equal to another, but from the poor to the rich, from the weak to the powerful. The wealthy can and do burn more fuels, after all. A remarkable study published this year in Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences found that black and Hispanic Americans experience about 55 percent more air pollution than they cause. White Americans, meanwhile, suffer 17 percent less air pollution than they cause. No wonder black children are four times as likely to die from asthma as white children.

https://www.theatlantic.com/science/arch...as/589000/