At SolveClimate, Elizabeth McGowan writes: Obama Can Cut Fossil Fuel Subsidies and Save $39 Billion, But Will Congress Go Along?
David Goldwyn of the State Department made it clear during a talk in Washington [earlier this month] that reining in fossil fuel subsidies worldwide would help to make a significant dent in greenhouse gas emissions. The Group of 20 has committed to doing so and the International Energy Agency will be keeping score, said Goldwyn, who is [stepped down Jan. 14] from his position as coordinator for international energy affairs.
In the United States, he pointed out, reducing subsidies “will be a political battle.”
“The one piece you can lay at the Obama doorstep is a failure to push this issue,” Steve Kretzmann, executive director of the Washington-based nonprofit Oil Change International, told SolveClimate News in an interview. “He has put it in his budget the last two years and Congress didn’t pick up on it. A campaign from the White House about eliminating subsidies could do a lot.”
Obama drew kudos from Kretzmann and others for his resolve in September 2009 at the G20 Pittsburgh Summit when he called on member nations to wean the fossil fuels industry of taxpayer-funded subsidies and outlined specifically how the United States would undertake such cuts. But nothing more than talk happened on either front yet.
For decades, tax breaks and federal incentives have been a boon to the U.S. fossil fuels industry. Numbers compiled by the Environmental Law Institute reveal that those figures totaled $72 billion between 2002 and 2008—about $10 billion annually. Figures from Kretzmann’s organization put annual U.S. subsidy figures to these mature technologies somewhere between $6 billion and $39 billion annually, depending on what is included in the count. ...
In an ideal world, purists say, all energy subsidies would be eliminated. But that doesn’t make sense, they point out, in a country where federal subsidies have been handed out to oil and gas since 1916 and to coal since 1932. Renewables need to be receiving hefty infusions if this country is intent on dropping carbon emissions 17 percent below 2005 levels by 2020.
“We’re not going to level this playing field quickly because it is incredibly tilted,” Kretzmann said. “We need to build the infrastructure so renewables have the chance to compete. In many places, wind is competitive with coal already and so is distributed solar.
“Fossil fuel technology has survived on trillions of dollars of government largesse over the years,” he continued. “This is about beginning to correct this historic imbalance.”
Click here for larger version of the graphic.
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At Daily Kos on this date in 2004:
| 609 allied troops have died thanks to Bush's folly, and that of the world leaders that misguidedly follow his lead.
And lest it get lost in the shuffle, all this death and destruction was unecessary. The administration's point man on the WMD search has explicitly stated there were no weapons of mass destruction in Iraq. ...
Problem is, the intelligence community did tell Bush that Iraq posed no threat. That is why Cheney and Rumsfeld set up their own intelligence operation inside the Pentagon to make an end-run against an uncooperative CIA. Because the CIA wouldn't give Bush the rationale for war he seeked. So they made shit up, and now they're trying to pin it on the intelligence community.
Bush lied, people died. Or, in the alternative, Bush is an incompetent moron, and people died. |
Tonight's Quote: "Speaker Boehner is our Dwight Eisenhower in the battle against the Obama Administration. Majority Leader Cantor is our Omar Bradley. I want to be George Patton - put anything in my scope and I will shoot it.”
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