Of course we should stop subsidising bad things
We’re a great deal more sympathetic to this argument than most will think we are:
The world is spending at least $2.6tn (£2tn) a year on subsidies that drive global heating and destroy nature, according to new analysis.
Governments continue to provide billions of dollars in tax breaks, subsidies and other spending that directly work against the goals of the 2015 Paris climate agreement and the 2022 Kunming-Montreal agreement to halt biodiversity loss, the research from the organisation Earth Track found, with countries providing direct support for deforestation, water pollution and fossil fuel consumption.
Yes, obviously, we should not subsidise bad things.
Now we’re a lot more sceptical about those international agreements than many. That all the meetings are held during Northern Hemisphere winters in nice low latitudes seems something of a hint to us - it can’t always be the existence of significant air traffic connections, can it? But leave our general scepticism of the process out of it.
We don’t want to be doing bad things let alone subsidising them. So, if the thing is a bad thing then we should obviously not be increasing usage through subsidy. We’ve no problem at all with that chain of logic.
The report itself is also pretty good on what is a bad thing and what is a subsidy to it. We’d not do so far as to say completely right, but rightish at least. The biggie - getting on for half the total - is subsidies to fossil fuels. And yes, obviously, these should stop.
But the thing they’ve got right is the identification of what is a subsidy. We’ll all recall that $7 trillion number The Guardian shrieks about but that’s not what is used in this report. Instead of a subsidy being “not paying a carbon tax and also full consumption taxation” which the IMF uses as their definition here a subsidy is an actual, direct, cash out the door, subsidy to the use or production of fossil fuels.
As it happens we here in the UK doesn’t have those by the IMF definition subsidies on petrol and diesel so we’ve nothing to do here. Well, now we’ve stopped subsidising domestic energy bills at least. It’s also true that we - again pretty much and near totally - don’t have any subsidies to fossil fuels by this narrower definition. OK, we here in the UK are being good chappies and we’re done then.
It’s the others, out there, that need to up their game on these subsidies. We’re already done.
Which leads to just one of those niggling little thoughts. The argument in favour of us spending £ trillions on birdchoppers and a zero carbon grid is that Johnny Foreigner will, staggered by the immensity of our moral leadership, then do the same. Yet we’ve already stopped subsidising fossil fuels and they aitn’t. So there could be a hole in the logic here. Anyone got a contact number for the planet the Sec of State is currently residing upon?
Tim Worstall