Earth Track Document

Presentation at the 124th Annual Meeting of the National Association of Regulatory Utility Commissioners for a panel entitled "How Should Subsidies be Crafted to Ensure Usefulness as an Effective Tool to Achieve Energy Policy Objectives."  The presentation discussed the range of energy subsidies, commonly ignored market supports to conventional fuels, and ways to improve subsidy efficiency.  Other presentations on the panel can be accessed here.

Although data on fossil fuel subsidies around the world have been growing, most of this information focuses on national level policies.  The thousands of subsidies at the state, provincial or local levels are largely untracked -- with little visibility either in the United States or in most other countries of the world. 

Despite a stated commitment to using market forces, the Romney campaign is turning a blind eye to large and distortionary subsidies to conventional fuels.  This review highlights problems with how Romney has framed the energy subsidy problem and highlights important subsidies to fossil fuels that he has ignored. 

Webinar slides prepared for the Vote Solar Initiative to provide an overview of fossil fuel subsidies.  The presentation discusses the informational gaps that often plague numbers on fossil fuel subsidies reported in the press, and provides a number of frameworks and tools to help Vote Solar members to more comprehensively assess that subsidies that competing projects may be receiving.

In this, our second review of progress in meeting this phase out commitment (an earlier review was published in November 2010), we reviewed formal submittals by member countries to the G20 and the WTO, reached out individually to staff from each member country, and reviewed third-party assessments of fossil fuel subsidies. We conclude that the G20 effort is currently failing. The following factors are the key reasons for this failure.

For the past decade imports of tar sands crude oil or bitumen have been increasing. Tar sands is stripmined and drilled in an energy‐and water‐intensive process from under the Boreal forests and wetlands of Alberta. In the process, Canada is destroying critical habitat while releasing three times the greenhouse gas emissions as conventional oil production.

The Keystone XL tar sands pipeline project, like all oil industry projects, benefits from substantial taxpayer subsidies.  Some, like reduced property taxes, are directed at the pipeline itself.  Others increase the viability of the pipeline by reducing the cost of the oil going into it, or the cost of processing it at the other end.