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Government incentives will play an important role in reconciling the competing demands on our planet’s resources. But new research reveals at least $1.8tn (£1.3tn) of environmentally harmful subsidies is heading in the wrong direction every year, financing the annihilation of wildlife and global heating through support for cattle ranching, pesticide use, the overproduction of crops and fossil fuel extraction...

From 2010 to 2021, the United States’ major trade and development finance institutions, the U.S. Export Import Bank (EXIM) and U.S. International Development Finance Corporation (DFC), provided almost five
times as much support to fossil fuels as to renewables – USD 51.6 billion compared to USD 10.9 billion.

As with earlier reports, The World Nuclear Industry Status Report 2022 (WNISR2022) provides a comprehensive overview of global nuclear power plant data, including information on age, operation, production, and construction of reactors. But due to the unprecedented situation in Ukraine, WNISR2022 includes a dedicated chapter that assesses the specific challenges and risks of Nuclear Power and War.

Ron Steenblik and Doug Koplow join the Cosmopolicast (part of the Cosmopolitan Globalist) and hosts Claire Berlinski and Vivek Y. Kelkar for an hour of discussion about energy subsidies and environmentally-harmful subsidies. How did we end up working on this issue? How big are they? How can people better understand the opaque, perverse, and often counterproductive nature of energy subsidies?

Harvard Management Company is responsible for investing the Harvard endowment. The annual Climate Report is the primary way that HMC communicates with the general public on its actions to move the portfolio to net zero by 2050. Though this is the second year the Climate Report has been produced, reporting remains sparse and overly general. The result is a document that is largely unhelpful in properly evaluating HMC's progress, interim milestones, and key challenges. Earth Track has provided detailed commentary on the second Climate Report in the attached document.

Industry-specific reviews of government subsidies have been much more common than analyses examining several natural resource sectors at once. Yet there is a great deal of overlap across sectors. Indeed, it is the combination of support provided by multiple levels of government and government programs, across numerous natural resource areas, that can accelerate resource depletion, pollution, or habitat loss in particular regions.

Multinational firms often use complicated corporate structures and arcane provisions of the tax code to minimize or eliminate their global tax payments. Arcane changes in tax rules can give rise to big losses in tax revenues to country treasuries, as happened in the 2017 tax law passed under the Trump Administration, to the great benefit of oil and gas firms. Under this law, companies that extract oil and gas overseas enjoy special exemptions within the Global Intangible Low-Tax (GILTI) regime covering Foreign Oil and Gas Extraction Income (FOGEI).

The author examined support by provincial and federal governments in Canada to three major pipeline projects, none of which has been completed to date. At least eight different types of financial support measures provided for Trans Mountain, two for Keystone XL, and two for Coastal GasLink. Cumulatively, Canadian governments have provided over CAD 23 billion in government support since 2018. Of this, over CAD 11 billion is in loans, and at least CAD 10 billion is loan guarantees or liabilities.