Earthtrack in the Media

The world is spending at least $1.8tn (£1.3tn) every year on subsidies driving the annihilation of wildlife and a rise in global heating, according to a new study, prompting warnings that humanity is financing its own extinction.

From tax breaks for beef production in the Amazon to financial support for unsustainable groundwater pumping in the Middle East, billions of pounds of government spending and other subsidies are harming the environment, says the first cross-sector assessment for more than a decade.

The powerful fossil fuel interests that reap huge subsidies on the federal level have been doing the very same thing on the state level in the US.

In many states, the coal, oil and natural gas industries are  among the most powerful industries, and have been benefiting from political deals for decades.

A group of environmentalists says taxpayers should be worried about extending an $8 billion credit line to Georgia Power's Plant Vogtle nuclear expansion project in Augusta.

To kickstart more nuclear development, the Obama administration in 2010 conditionally committed the government to the massive loan.

Sara Barczak, an attorney with the Southern Alliance for Clean Energy, says given ongoing project delays and cost overruns, taxpayers should be leary of the investment.

While no nuclear loan guarantees have been granted, one has nonetheless been promised to the companies now building the Vogtle 3 and 4 reactors, near Augusta, Ga. It is not clear whether those builders, led by the Southern Company, will actually accept a federal guarantee; Southern says it has been shopping in the private market.

Construction of the first newly licensed US nuclear power plant in decades could become a "Solyndra-like" debacle thanks to billions in federal loan guarantees whose terms appear too weak to protect taxpayers, according to one group’s analysis of internal documents released by the US Department of Energy. 

The Obama administration’s approval of a federal loan guarantee for the construction of two Georgia nuclear reactors was met with applause from across the political spectrum, but new analysis reveals potential Solyndra-like problems facing the project.

Three years after the U.S. Department of Energy approved an $8.3 billion loan guarantee to be used by Southern Co. and its partners to build two new nuclear reactors, the deal has yet to be finalized. A Georgia-based clean energy group says that the loan should shut down because it places taxpayers at extreme risk.

Environmental groups are crying foul on loan terms acquired by Southern Company for its Vogtle nuclear plant.

The Southern Alliance for Clean Energy and others are calling for a greater degree of transparency in the federally-backed financing of the delayed and over-budget project.Anti-nuclear activists are drawing comparisons to the failed energy company Solyndra in a report that took three years to complete.

The nuclear plant near Augusta is the first new reactor to be built in the US in over a decade.

...Moreover, citizens and companies that rely on fossil fuels usually do not pay the full cost of resulting environmental  problems like oil spills, sludge from coal mines and greenhouse gases, and for health problems from polluted air.

Estimates of the cost of these effects — or “externalities” in the ungainly jargon of economists — vary.