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posted by CoolHand on Tuesday May 19 2015, @06:01PM   Printer-friendly
from the extant-dinosaurs-dealing-in-dead-dinosaurs dept.

Common Dreams reports

Governments are failing to properly tax fossil fuel consumption, with enormous environmental costs, the IMF reports.

The fossil fuel industry receives $5.3 trillion a year in government subsidies, despite its disastrous toll on the environment, human health, and other global inequality issues, a new report by the International Monetary Fund (IMF) published [May 18] has found.

That means that governments worldwide are spending $10 million every minute to fund energy companies--more than the estimated public health spending for the entire globe, IMF economists Benedict Clements and Vitor Gaspar wrote in a blog post accompanying the report (pdf).

[...]Subsidies occur in two ways, IMF Fiscal Affairs Department directors Sanjeev Gupta and Michael Keen explained in a separate blog post published [May 18]:

"[Pre-tax]" subsidies--which occur when people and businesses pay less than it costs to supply the energy--are smaller than a few years back. But "post-tax" subsidies--which add to pre-tax subsidies an amount that reflects the environmental, health and other damage that energy use causes and the benefit from favorable VAT or sales tax treatment--remain extremely high, and indeed are now well above our previous estimates.

[...]If anything, the report's findings are "conservative", Steve Kretzmann, executive director of Oil Change International, told Common Dreams. "[It] doesn't include direct subsidies to fossil fuel producers, and it doesn't include things like the cost of military resources to defend Persian Gulf oil."

 
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  • (Score: 2) by aclarke on Wednesday May 20 2015, @01:43AM

    by aclarke (2049) on Wednesday May 20 2015, @01:43AM (#185271) Homepage

    Well said. The first link reports that China is contributing $2.3 trillion of the $5.6 trillion annual estimate. However, this is a simplistic view of the issue, as obviously the rest of the world is outsourcing our dirty work to China. So really, it's we who are polluting in China, helping to cause those estimated > 1M premature pollution-related deaths per year in China.

    I've lately been trying to think through a potential solution that would involve an environmental levy on imported products. The levy would attempt to quantify the environmental cost of the product and then apply that to the product upon import. That money collected would then be placed in an environmental cleanup fund or something, rather than simply being used to fund the government. The problem is that in a global economy there are too many leaks. For example, here in Canada you'd just get people driving over the border to the US and smuggling goods back without paying the levy. However, if it could be properly applied it would significantly level the economic field between locally produced and imported items, as well as providing an incentive for companies to produce items in an environmentally friendly fashion and for countries to clean up their act and tighten their environmental regulations.

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