Jayati Ghosh has a new column in Project Syndicate, entitled “Hidden Carbon Subsidies Will Destroy Us,” in which she argues that Western governments are subsidizing fossil fuels at an even greater rate than known:
In a recent study, the International Monetary Fund devised a more comprehensive measure that includes both explicit subsidies, or undercharging for supply costs, and implicit subsidies, or undercharging for environmental costs and foregone consumption taxes.
The IMF estimated that global fossil-fuel subsidies in 2020 totaled $5.9 trillion, more than ten times the OECD-IEA estimate. That is not surprising: Implicit subsidies accounted for 92% of the total.
