Fuel Subsidy Quotes

Not only do fossil fuel companies receive $775 billion to $1 trillion in annual global subsidies, but they pay nothing for the privilege of treating our shared atmosphere as a free waste dump—a fact that has been described by the Stern Review on the Economics of Climate Change as “the greatest market failure the world has ever seen.

In 2018, a paper by David Keith demonstrated a method for removing carbon at a cost perhaps as low as $ 94 per ton—which would make the cost of neutralizing our 32 gigatons of annual global emissions about $ 3 trillion. If that sounds intimidating, keep in mind, estimates for the total global fossil fuel subsidies paid out each year run as high as $ 5 trillion. In 2017, the same year the United States pulled out of the Paris Agreement, the country also approved a $ 2.3 trillion tax cut—primarily for the country’s richest, who demanded relief.

In pursuit of making this quantity of food, agribusinesses have invested in a handful of high-yield crops and products,¶ typically grown or produced on land that should be tropical forest, using agrochemical inputs – fertilisers, pesticides, herbicides, and lots and lots of fossil fuel of course. Supported by government subsidies, this approach has led to a global glut of commodity crop production, and declining food diversity.

We basically used oil and aquifer water to temporarily boost the carrying capacity of the land, all for economic growth demanded by Wall Street investors. It’s a crazy system that only makes sense when you foist all the costs onto taxpayers in the form of crop subsidies that benefit agribusiness, and defense spending to secure fossil fuels. We’re basically paying for corporations to seize control of the food supply and dictate to us the terms under which we live.

So the much criticized food subsidy and employment guarantee for the poor and the unemployed cost about 1.14 per cent of GDP, whereas the cost of subsidizing electricity, fuel and fertilizers for the relatively better off is minimally 2.63 per cent, more than twice what is allocated to feed the poor and provide employment to the unemployed.

Even today, the suburbs remain such an illogical system of living that they require immense subsidy in order to function (and they still function poorly). For the privilege of enduring traffic, air pollution, isolation, and monotony, Americans subsidize the suburbs to the tune of $100 billion a year. Without massive highway funding as well as fuel and mortgage subsidies, the suburbs could not exist. These subsidies to the suburbs have given us the twin illusions that the American city was in some sort of natural tailspin for decades and that the suburbs are inherently more desirable, when in reality the suburbs are just better funded.

Nuclear power is a permanent disaster. Producing its uranium fuel is an environmental disaster - now tucked and folded over the horizon in mostly-poor countries where miners are paid $5 a day and unprotected against radiation. Building reactors is a financial disaster, always shifted to government subsidies. Waste disposal is both an environmental and economic disaster. When the fateful time comes to decommission the Doomsday Machines, after the easy 10-year life extensions run out, this is another economic disaster. But when a reactor becomes what it really is - the most massive Dirty Bomb you or Bin Laden (radhi Allah anhu) can imagine - the nuclear disaster will be hard to yank out of the media, quicktime, and carry on like nothing ever happened.

Environmental pollution is a regressive phenomenon, since the rich can find ways of insulating themselves from bad air, dirty water, loss of green spaces and so on. Moreover, much pollution results from production and activities that benefit the more affluent – air transport, car ownership, air conditioning, consumer goods of all kinds, to take some obvious examples. A basic income could be construed, in part, as partial compensation for pollution costs imposed on us, as a matter of social justice. Conversely, a basic income could be seen as compensation for those adversely affected by environmental protection measures. A basic income would make it easier for governments to impose taxes on polluting activities that might affect livelihoods or have a regressive impact by raising prices for goods bought by low-income households. For instance, hefty carbon taxes would deter fossil fuel use and thus reduce greenhouse gas emissions and mitigate climate change as well as reduce air pollution. Introducing a carbon tax would surely be easier politically if the tax take went towards providing a basic income that would compensate those on low incomes, miners and others who would lose income-earning opportunities. The basic income case is especially strong in relation to the removal of fossil fuel subsidies. Across the world, in rich countries and in poor, governments have long used subsidies as a way of reducing poverty, by keeping down the price of fuel. This has encouraged more consumption, and more wasteful use, of fossil fuels. Moreover, fuel subsidies are regressive, since the rich consume more and thus gain more from the subsidies. But governments have been reluctant to reduce or eliminate the subsidies for fear of alienating voters. Indeed, a number of countries that have tried to reduce fuel subsidies have backed down in the face of angry popular demonstrations.

ethanol may actually make some kinds of air pollution worse. It evaporates faster than pure gasoline, contributing to ozone problems in hot temperatures. A 2006 study published in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences concluded that ethanol does reduce greenhouse gas emissions by 12 percent relative to gasoline, but it calculated that devoting the entire U.S. corn crop to make ethanol would replace only a small fraction of American gasoline consumption. Corn farming also contributes to environmental degradation due to runoff from fertilizer and pesticides. But to dwell on the science is to miss the point. As the New York Times noted in the throes of the 2000 presidential race, ―Regardless of whether ethanol is a great fuel for cars, it certainly works wonders in Iowa campaigns. The ethanol tax subsidy increases the demand for corn, which puts money in farmers‘ pockets. Just before the Iowa caucuses, corn farmer Marvin Flier told the Times, ―Sometimes I think [the candidates] just come out and pander to us, he said. Then he added, ―Of course, that may not be the worst thing. The National Corn Growers Association figures that the ethanol program increases the demand for corn, which adds 30 cents to the price of every bushel sold. Bill Bradley opposed the ethanol subsidy during his three terms as a senator from New Jersey (not a big corn-growing state). Indeed, some of his most important accomplishments as a senator involved purging the tax code of subsidies and loopholes that collectively do more harm than good. But when Bill Bradley arrived in Iowa as a Democratic presidential candidate back in 1992, he ―spoke to some farmers‖ and suddenly found it in his heart to support tax breaks for ethanol. In short, he realized that ethanol is crucial to Iowa voters, and Iowa is crucial to the presidential race.

screamed night and day, blotted out the starlit skies and Northern Lights with flashing red strobes, slaughtered thousands of bats and entire flocks of birds, banished tourism and wildlife, made people sick and drove them from their now-valueless homes. But though there was very little wind and the turbines made almost no electricity, they made billions in taxpayer-paid subsidies for energy companies and investment banks, some of which trickled down to their fully-owned politicians and “environmental” groups. As I’d learned in previous dealings with WindPower LLC, these turbines did absolutely nothing for global warming. Because wind is so erratic, wind projects must have fulltime fossil fuel plants to back them up, and the result is that wind projects often cause more coal-burning, not less. And the saddest thing is that these billions of dollars wasted on industrial wind projects could be spent on rooftop solar, substantially reducing CO2 generation and fossil fuel use. But the utilities hate rooftop solar, despite what they pretend, because it cuts their income, so they are avidly trying to curtail it.

when the EPA issued its first-ever plan to limit carbon emissions from power plants and five conservative justices (then including Justice Scalia) blocked the law while it was still under review in the lower courts, before it had even reached them. This was a procedural eyebrow-raiser of a ruling without precedent in U.S. history, one that I reckon saved the fossil fuel industry $100 billion per year (assuming it would have cost them about one-sixth of their annual federal pollution subsidy).3

While it didn’t end subsidies, Freedom to Farm made one critical change that benefitted Tyson Foods. The law disbanded production controls. Farmers got their government checks, and they could grow whatever they wanted. When the production controls went away, farmers did what they do best: They massively overproduced. The world was glutted with corn, wheat, and soybeans. Prices plummeted, farmers bemoaned the low prices, and taxpayer subsidies grew rapidly to cover farmers’ losses. This cycle led to a remarkable gift for meat producers. Feed grains were the biggest cost that Tyson Foods had to pay to raise animals. If feed grains got too expensive, the company’s profits could quickly vanish. Freedom to Farm didn’t just make grains cheaper for Tyson. The federal program went so far as to produce an upside-down food economy, where corn was actually cheaper to buy than it was to grow. This inverted market had a strange effect. It made it economically irrational to be a diversified farm, the once-traditional kind of operation where farmers raised hogs, cattle, soybeans, and corn. A farmer lost money if he or she grew corn and fed it to animals that he or she owned under Freedom to Farm. This was financial jet fuel for the new breed of industrial meat producers. The companies weren’t diversified farms, after all. They bought corn; they didn’t grow it. For industrial hog producers alone, Freedom to Farm delivered about $947 million a year in savings, according to one study.

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I’m sure there are some readers who will choke on the word subsidy. The gasoline subsidy in the U.S. is not a visible thing that shows up in the budget documents, but it’s there. Keeping a standing Army and Navy at the ready to defend oil fields on the other side of the world is an extraordinary subsidy for gas-powered vehicles. Cheap leases on federal land for drilling and mining are subsidies. Tax breaks for the fossil-fuel industry are subsidies. If we enhanced the grid, subsidized electric vehicles, and let gasoline cost what people are really willing to pay (and what we really pay to get and protect it), we could bring a lot of our military home. And change the world.

Not only do fossil fuel companies receive $775 billion to $1 trillion in annual global subsidies, but they pay nothing for the privilege of treating our shared atmosphere as a free waste dump—a fact that has been described by the Stern Review on the Economics of Climate Change as “the greatest market failure the world has ever seen.” That freebie is the real distortion, that theft of the sky the real subsidy.13

As countries move from fossil fuel power generation to cut carbon dioxide emissions, solar power is gaining market share around the world. Germany, thanks to a decade of generous subsidies, has more installed solar power capacity than any other country. But large coal- and gas-fired plants still have at least one big advantage over solar panels — they cannot be uprooted and carted away. As German solar supply has increased, so has the theft of panels, cables and inverters. “Solar theft continues to increase, despite the measures taken to prevent it,” says Frank Fiedler, chief executive of SecondSol, an online trading platform for solar products that has documented scores of such cases on a website. “Thieves are able to escape with thousands of euros worth of equipment.” Although panels sometimes disappear from residential rooftops, large solar parks are the main target. These tend to be situated outside built-up areas where organised gangs can pull up in lorries, work unobserved overnight and then make their escape. Losses sometimes reach as much as €500,000, Germany’s federal criminal police office says. It warns that solar panels are “often insufficiently [protected] or not secured at all”.

the German and Japanese governments heavily subsidized their chemical industries for war purposes. Government subsidies, direct or indirect, spurred German developments in synthetic rubber and plastics, synthetic fuels, light metals, and various other substitutes for natural materials. However, the world's chemical industries would have grown rapidly without artificial encouragement.

A gaudy amount of money, most in the form of government subsidies, has been shoveled into solar power research since the first Arab oil embargo of the 1970s. The subsidies have enriched various folks nimble enough or connected enough to receive them. But they have produced very little in the way of power, and nothing that can compete with power generated by fossil fuels.

Taxpayers have forked out roughly £80 billion since 2010 in fuel duty subsidies, which, research has found, has increased our carbon emissions by 7% by making driving cheaper than other options.

[These children] know what they think of Donald Trump in the United States and Jair Bolsonaro in Brazil and Scott Morrison in Australia and all the other leaders who torch the planet with defiant glee while denying science so basic that these kids could grasp it easily at age eight. Their verdict is just as damning, if not more so, for the leaders who deliver passionate and moving speeches about the imperative to respect the Paris Climate Agreement and "make the planet great again" (France's Emanuel Macron, Canada's Justin Trudeau, and so many others), but who then shower subsidies, handouts, and licences on the fossil fuel and agribusiness giants driving ecological breakdown.

But our biggest enemies are all the knee-jerk politically correct folks who still don’t understand that wind power doesn’t lower greenhouse gases or fossil fuel use, but it destroys environments, property values, human health, millions of birds and bats and many other things. And that it only exists because of huge taxpayer subsidies, billions and billions that can never be repaid, money that goes straight into the pockets of the oil companies and investment banks behind these schemes … They make billions but never risk a cent.

of climate change. What was needed was a massive nudge in the right direction. In the past, the stick of regulation and the rod of taxation were the methods that environmentalists believed could break the fossil fuel economy. But the Inflation Reduction Act doesn’t rely on such punitive tactics, because Manchin culled them from the bill. Instead, it imagined that the United States could become the global leader of a booming climate economy, if the government provided tax credits and subsidies, a lucrative set of incentives. There was a cost associated with the bill. By the Congressional Budget Office’s score, it offered $386 billion in tax credits to encourage the production of wind turbines, solar panels, geothermal plants, and battery storage. Tax credits would reduce the cost of electric vehicles so that they would become the car of choice for Middle America. But $386 billion was an estimate, not a price tag, since the legislation didn’t cap the amount of money available in tax credits. If utilities wanted to build more wind turbines or if demand for electric vehicles surged, the government would keep spending. When Credit Suisse studied the program, it estimated that so many businesses and consumers will avail themselves of the tax credits that the government could spend nearly $800 billion. If Credit Suisse is correct, then the tax credits will unleash $1.7 trillion in private sector spending on green technologies. Within six years, solar and wind energy produced by the US will be the cheapest in the world. Alternative energies will cross a threshold: it will become financially irresponsible not to use them. Even though Joe Biden played a negligible role in the final negotiations, the Inflation Reduction Act exudes his preferences. He romanticizes the idea of factories building stuff. It is a vision of the Goliath of American manufacturing, seemingly moribund, sprung back to life. At the same time that the legislation helps to stall climate change, it allows the United States to dominate the industries of the future. This was a bill that, in the end, climate activists and a broad swath of industry could love. Indeed, strikingly few business lobbies, other than finance and pharma, tried to stymie the bill in its final stages. It was a far cry from the death struggles over energy legislation in the Clinton and Obama administrations, when industry scuppered transformational legislation. The Inflation Reduction Act will allow the United States to prevent its own decline. And not just economic decline. Without such a meaningful program, the United States would have had no standing to prod other countries to respond more aggressively to climate change. It would have been a marginal player in shaping the response to the planet’s greatest challenge. The bill was an investment in moral authority.

The negative impacts (of biofuels) were much greater than most had anticipated...the amount of crops needed to fill an SUV’s fuel tank with biofuel would feed a child for an entire year, and every gallon of biofuel wiped out forty meals… “A srong climate campaigner called the subsidies driving the biofuel industry’s growth ‘a crime against humanity.’ Yet, vested agricultural interests had made the bad policies almost impossible to overturn. It seems that we have learned little from recent history, as we plow headlong into new policies that will similarly hurt the world’s poor.

Let me take you back in time a little,” says Anumita Roychowdhury, an elegant woman in a beige and pale blue wrap. She’s the director of the Center for Science and Environment, a group that’s played a leading role in the years of battles over air quality. In the 1990s, she tells me, Delhi’s air was so bad “you couldn’t go out in the city without your eyes watering.” India had no regulations on vehicles or fuel, so despite advances elsewhere in the world, engines here hadn’t improved for 40 years, and fuel quality was abysmal. It was the activist Supreme Court that changed that. Its judges started issuing orders, and from 1998 to about 2003, a series of important new rules came into force. Polluting industries were pushed out of the city, auto-rickshaws and buses were converted to CNG, and emission limits for vehicles were introduced, then tightened. “These were pretty big steps,” Roychowdhury says, and they brought results. “If you plot the graph of particulate matter in Delhi, you will see after 2002 the levels actually coming down.” The public noticed. “I still remember the 2004 Assembly elections in Delhi, where the political parties were actually fighting with each other to take credit for the cleaner air. It had become an electoral issue.” So how did things go so wrong? The burst of activity petered out, and rapid growth in car ownership erased the improvements that had been won. “If you look at the pollution levels again from 2008 and ’09 onwards, you now see a steady increase,” Roychowdhury says. “We could not keep the momentum going.” Indeed, particulate levels jumped 75 percent in just a few years.14 Even the action that was taken, she believes, “was too little. We had to do a lot more, more aggressively.” Part of the reason government stopped pushing, Roychowdhury believes, is that the moves needed next would have had to address Delhiites’ growing fondness for cars, so would surely have prompted public anger. “There is a hidden subsidy for all of us who use cars today,” she says. “We barely pay anything in terms of parking charges, we barely pay anything in terms of road taxes. It is so easy to buy a car because of easy loans. So there is absolutely no disincentive.” About 80 percent of transportation spending is focused on drivers, even though they’re only about 15 percent of Delhiites. “The entire infrastructure of the city is getting redesigned to facilitate car movement, but not people’s movement.

The big decline started in 1990 when the Soviet Union was breaking apart and Moscow dropped its “friendly rates” for exports to North Korea. Without subsidized fuel and other commodities, the economy creaked to a halt. There was no way for the government to keep the domestic fertilizer factories running, and no fuel for trucks to deliver imported fertilizer to farms. Crop yields dropped sharply. At the same time, Russia almost completely cut off food aid. China helped out for a few years, but it was also going through big changes and increasing its economic ties with capitalist countries—like South Korea and the United States—so it, too, cut off some of its subsidies and started demanding hard currency for exports. North Korea had already defaulted on its bank loans, so it couldn’t borrow a penny. By the time Kim Il Sung died in 1994, famine was already taking hold in the northern provinces. Government rations had been cut sharply, and sometimes they failed to arrive at all. Instead of changing its policies and reforming its programs, North Korea responded by ignoring the crisis.

The vast majority of major, collaborative infrastructure projects around the world have been guided by government policy and funded by public resources: sanitation systems, road systems, railway networks, public health systems, national power grids, the postal service. These are not the spontaneous outcomes of market forces, much less of abstract growth. Projects like these require public investment. Once we realise this, it becomes clear that we can fund the transition quite easily by directing existing public resources from, say, fossil fuel subsidies (which presently stand at $5.2 trillion, 6.5% of global GDP) and military expenditure ($1.8 trillion) into solar panels, batteries and wind turbines.

What’s interesting is that most free-marketers don’t seem to want a free market at all, but a status quo market. The market in the United States is anything but free. If it were, big business would have to survive without corporate welfare to the tune of about $1 trillion (that’s trillion) in government subsidies, the majority of which, about $650 billion, go to the fossil fuel industry! They are living off of the public dole on subsidies totaling billions of dollar—that we hand out either directly, or through tax breaks for their big corporations—with the false assumption that they are creating jobs. They are not. They are creating yachts, Leer Jets, and McMansions with swimming pools.

What’s interesting is that most free-marketers don’t seem to want a free market at all, but a status quo market. The market in the United States is anything but free. If it were, big business would have to survive without corporate welfare to the tune of about $1 trillion (that’s trillion) in government subsidies, the majority of which, about $650 billion, go to the fossil fuel industry! They are living off of the public dole on subsidies totaling billions of dollars—that we hand out either directly, or through tax breaks for their big corporations—with the false assumption that they are creating jobs. They are not. They are creating yachts, Leer Jets, and McMansions with swimming pools.