USA

Pennsylvania is subsidizing fossil fuels at a cost of almost $2.9 billion per year.  Use of these fuels burdens taxpayers with additional non-monetized externalities such as air, land and water pollution and the associated negative human health and property impacts. Since many of these subsidies were passed years or decades ago, Pennsylvania’s current policymakers may not all be aware that these subsidies exist or understand their cumulative impacts.

Burning Public Money for Dirty Energy presents an overview of how U.S. energy policies are creating a range of subsidies for municipal waste incineration (MSW) projects, including emerging waste burning technologies of gasification, pyrolysis and plasma arc incineration. This report also identifies incentives for a wider spectrum of industries that are starting to identify as “waste-to-energy” projects, such as landfill gas to energy systems and anaerobic digestion (or biogas) facilities.

Using data culled from the academic literature, government documents, and NGO sources, in this paper we examine the extent of federal support (as well as support from the various states in pre-Civil War America) for emerging energy technologies in their early days. We then analyze discrete periods in history when the federal government enacted specific subsidies.

"The six financial institutions below (Citigroup, Credit Suisse, Goldman Sachs, Lehman Brothers, Merrill Lynch and Morgan Stanley) are convinced that loan guarantees are an important tool, along with supportive state government policies, to enable the financing in the credit markets of new nuclear power plants in the United States. We are concerned that the Proposed Rule is not workable, and are providing our perspective in the hope that it will assist the Department of Energy in developing final regulations to implement this essential program.

Numerous energy subsidies exist in the U.S. tax code and have been there for up to a century. In certain cases the circumstances relevant at the time of implementation may no longer exist. Today, for example, the domestic fossil fuel industries (coal, oil, natural gas) are mature and highly profitable, and numerous other energy resources that do not create the negative health and environmental effects associated with the extraction and burning of fossil fuels are available.

American taxpayers and ratepayers are subsidizing a form of “renewable” energy—biomass electricity- that causes short and long-term harm to the public health and the environment. There are 234 of these so-called “clean and green” biomass electricity projects proposed for the U.S. The scale of these plants ranges from 25 to more than 100 megawatts (MW), often dwarfing the 255 existing biomass power facilities, which generally range from 2 to 5 MW capacity. This polluting form of electricity production currently accounts for over 50% of the so-called “renewable” energy in the U.S.

During World War I, U.S. taxpayers provided the oil and gas industry with its first federal tax break. Over the decades, more lucrative tax breaks have been added. The latest major installment came with the passage of the 2005 Energy Policy Act, which included another $2.6 billion in subsidies for oil & gas companies. But it hasn’t stopped there. As recently as December of 2011, oil and gas companies received more subsidies. Each year the oil and gas industry takes advantage of tax breaks and other subsidies worth billions of dollars.

There are two basic international legal frameworks contributing to an international regime on nuclear liability: The International Atomic Energy Agency’s (IAEA) 1963 Convention on Civil Liability for Nuclear Damage (Vienna Convention), the Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development’s (OECD) 1960 Convention on Third Party Liability in the Field of Nuclear Energy (Paris Convention), and the associated “Brussels Supplementary Convention”3 of 1963. The Vienna and Paris liability conventions are also linked by a Joint Protocol adopted in 1988.