Energy

Ten Most Distortionary Energy Subsidies - Update (short version)

Complex security, environmental, and economic trade-offs remain the norm for the energy sector.   Government intervention is also the norm, and too often involves a torrent of energy plans, white-papers, and legislation.  In an ideal world, government policies should work in tandem with market forces to achieve an adequate energy supply mix that is cleaner and more diverse than what preceded it.  These synergies do not currently exist.  Instead, there are thousands of government energy market interventions in place around the world - many of which act counter to stated energy security, dive

Time to change the game: Fossil fuel subsidies and climate

This report documents the scale of fossil fuel subsidies and sets out a practical agenda for their elimination in the context of the global goal of tackling climate change. It spells out the real costs of fossil fuel subsidies within the top developed-country emitters (the E11), the G20, and more broadly across developing countries, and outlines ways to achieve their global phase-out by 2025.

Table 2: Subsidy Definitions Vary by Country, Lead to Gaps in Reporting and Reform Commitments

Table summarizing the ways G20 member countries have defined reportable subsidies to fossil fuels, and the gaps these definitions open up to missing entire classes of government support to the fossil fuels sector.  The table has been extracted from Phasing Out Fossil-Fuel Subsidies in the G20:  A Progress Update.  

Green Scissors 2012: Cutting Wasteful and Environmentally Harmful Spending

This report is the latest of a string of assessments produced over the past 18 years to identify and quantify federal subsidies that harm the environment as well as waste prodigious amounts of money.  The exact coalition producing the reports varies a bit year-to-year, but the Green Scissors Campaign has always been a collaboration between budget and environmental groups aimed at eliminating wasteful spending that is harmful to the environment.

Cost of Subsidizing Fossil Fuels Is High, but Cutting Them Is Tough

...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.

Shift the Subsidies: Tracking the flow of public money to energy projects around the world

For decades, wealthy countries have been using international aid and other foreign assistance—through grants, loans, equity and loan guarantees—to subsidize the expansion of the international fossil fuel industry.  Many of these institutions provide export insurance as well.

The Shift the Subsidies database is an interactive tool to visually track and analyze the flow of financial support from international, regional and bilateral public financial institutions around the world to the energy sector.

Inventory of estimated budgetary support and tax expenditures for fossil fuels

For the first time ever, the OECD has compiled an inventory of over 250 measures that support fossil-fuel production or use in 24 industrialised countries, which together account for 95% of energy supply in OECD countries. Those measures had an overall value of about USD 45-75 billion a year between 2005 and 2010.  In absolute terms, nearly half of this amount benefitted petroleum products (i.e.

Title 17 Loan Guarantee Bank Commentors 18 Months Later

These six banks submitted comments to DOE on the Title 17 loan guarantee program in July of 2007 that resulted in much more favorable terms for lenders.  Soon after, the financial crisis hit the US, and demonstrated that the banks had not done such a good job managing risk even in their own operations.  This chart illustrates how they fared; an "X" means the bank ceased operating as an independent entity. 

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