Earth Track presentation at the Biofuels Policy Forum briefing on April 14, 2011 in Washington, DC. The document provides an overview of the historical and projected level of subsidization to biofuels, and why this policy is not an efficient way to address concerns over greenhouse gas emissions or energy security.
Earth Track's submitted comments on the National Academy of Sciences' upcoming analysis on the effects of the federal tax code on greenhouse gas (ghg) emissions. The comments cover a variety of issues on subsidy valuation and presentation that have arisen during more than twenty years of work in this area. Issues addressed include subsidy valuation, econometric modeling of subsidy reform, what types of tax policies warrant consideration, and which sectors of the economy should be included. In each area, recommended approaches are provided.
Conspicuously absent from industry press releases and briefing memos touting nuclear power’s potential as a solution to global warming is any mention of the industry’s long and expensive history of taxpayer subsidies and excessive charges to utility ratepayers. These subsidies not only enabled the nation’s existing reactors to be built in the first place, but have also supported their operation for decades.
Keynote presentation at the OECD's expert workshop on estimating subsidies to fossil fuels, held in November 2010.
Earth Track presentation on fossil fuel subsidy reform at a joint meeting hosted by the Global Subsidies Initiative of the IISD and the United Nations Environment Programme in Geneva in October 2010, titled Increasing the Momentum of Fossil-Fuel Subsidy Reform: Developments and Opportunities. The presentation goes through lessons learned on subsidy transparency and challenges for reform based on case studies in China, Germany, Indonesia, and the United States.
In its September 2009 Communiqué from Pittsburgh, the G20 nations (“Group of Twenty” nations that include the largest economies in the world) committed to “rationalize and phase out over the medium term inefficient fossil fuel subsidies that encourage wasteful consumption.”
The ability to undertake any meaningful subsidy reforms, either nationally or multilaterally, is hampered by a basic lack of knowledge about the extent of support to the sector and where information on this support might be held. This multi-country research effort identifying and classifying different sources of data on fossil-fuel subsidies has begun to characterize the extent and nature of subsidy programs, identifying the analytical challenges that need to be overcome in order to de-subsidize.
This memo evaluates three tax subsidies to nuclear power contained in the American Power Act (APA): 5-year accelerated depreciation for reactors; a 10% investment tax credit; and an expansion of a production tax credit for nuclear. The draft Act was floated by Senators John Kerry (D-MA) and Joseph Lieberman (I-CT) in May 2010. Subsidy costs were evaluated using prototype AP1000 and Areva EPR reactor characteristics, and a range of values for cost of capital.
This Review provides the most detailed look to date at gaps in federal tracking of energy subsidies. In addition to evaluating the research approach used by the US Energy Information Administration (EIA), the Review assesses how key assumptions and omissions in EIA's work resulted in a substantial undercounting of federal energy subsidies and an inaccurate portrayal of subsidy distribution across fuels. EIA estimates are also placed in the context of other assessments of domestic energy subsidies conducted over the past thirty years.