Kajm #wingnut deviantart.com
(language alert!)
I've often wondered where total Morons get the 'subsidies' figures they claim for oil, coal and gas- figures which make absolutely NO sense. A recent example (don't ask me to find a comment made on an article on FB two weeks ago): That one particular oil company in British Columbia, Canada, receives $580 billion in subsidies.
I looked the company up. They bring in approximately $5 billion a year. Now, who the Fuck is stupid enough to believe that a company is being paid ONE HUNDRED SIXTEEN TIMES their worth in subsidies?
Where does the Damned Dumb BullShit come from?
'how does the IMF get away with claiming that subsidies are 12-times higher than they are – and that the USA is one of the worst perpetrators? By subverting the definition of subsidies.
Criticizing countries like India and China (or Kiribati) for the $424 billion spent on real subsidies is unlikely to attract the attention of rich world elites. To implicate developed country governments and create outrage, the IMF adds everything that they believe should be included in the cost of fossil fuels, and say that by not including these costs in the price of fuel, countries are “subsidizing” fossil fuels.
So what’s included in this outsized re-definition? First, the IMF comes up with a price-tag of $2.3 trillion for air pollution. Burning coal is incredibly polluting, so the IMF claims coal is subsidized because it doesn’t pay for all the air pollution it causes.
It’s valid to consider the unpriced costs of any policy – but it’s wrong to call this a “subsidy”. And, it is the entirely wrong way to fix air pollution. We should not tax coal but tax coal pollution (along with any other pollution) — essentially forcing coal power to clean up its act. Doing so would cost less than a tenth of the IMF’s $2.3 trillion estimate.
The IMF calculates that China’s coal air pollution costs $720 billion per year. This is a vast exaggeration: two (https://www.deviantart.com/users/outgoing?https://iopscience.iop.org/article/10.1088/1748-9326/aad138/meta) recent studies (https://www.deviantart.com/users/outgoing?https://journals.plos.org/plosone/article?id=10.1371/journal.pone.0215663) show China’s total air pollution costs $27-38 billion, or one-twentieth as much. And this is the cost for all air pollution, with another study (https://www.deviantart.com/users/outgoing?https://www.healtheffects.org/system/files/GBDMAPS-ExecSummEnglishFinal.pdf) showing less than half can be blamed on coal. So, the IMF has claimed that coal air pollution is 40 times costlier than it is, and then mislabeled this as a “subsidy”.
Next, the IMF claims that gasoline and diesel-driven cars cause a huge amount of congestion and traffic accidents. Sure they do – but so do electric vehicles. This is an argument for congestion charges and better road design, safety measures and speed limit enforcement. The absurdity is revealed when we realize that according to this logic, governments could reduce their fossil fuel “subsidies” by building more roads.
The authors go on to claim that every nation should implement a consistent VAT across all products. Because they don’t, the IMF counts “missing” VAT in countries like the USA as a subsidy. Not only is this an even more bizarre definition of “subsidy”, but it suggests the IMF’s political views on taxation should overrule the decisions of democratically elected governments.
'Scuse my language, please, but (yeah done)
btw: since 2010, subsidies to ostensible 'renewables' DWARF those paid to 'fossil fuel' companies https://www.deviantart.com/users/outgoing?https://blogs.ei.columbia.edu/2019/09/23/energy-subsidies-renewables-fossil-fuels/
Finally: Bjorn Lomborg, who wrote the above article, ONE HUNDRED PERCENT BELIEVES HUMANS ARE RESPONSIBLE FOR CURRENT CLIMATE CHANGE.
So if you come shrieking 'climate denier' I will boot your ass from my page.
