They're still working on figuring out the total, which is likely to be much larger. See the helpful comment below from Ron Steenblik, one of the authors.
Similarly, The Global Subsidies Initiative (an interesting institution in itself ...) suggests that fossil fuel subsidies outside the OECD are worth around $400 million, or getting on for $15 per person every year. As shown in the table, that's nearly 10 times the total subsidy available for renewables.
Finally, the OECD team has also estimated that removing subsidies to fossil fuels across all developing and emerging economies (I think this is the region where they have the best data) could cut global greenhouse gas emissions by 10%. And as we've seen before on this blog there are not many policies with that kind of potential.
Click here for the report this table comes from.
1 comment:
Your heart is in the right place, but your interpretation of the information that has been released is not correct.
First of all, the report from the OECD does not say that OECD countries are spending $9.1 billion a year on tax subsidies for fossil fuels. It simply lists some examples of tax-based subsidies for fossil fuels. If one were to tote up all the tax expeditures relating to fossil fuels provided by OECD countries annually (we're working on it), the total number would likely be much higher.
Second, the modelling work by the OECD, which looked at the effects on carbon emissions out to 2050 from the reform of certain fossil-fuel subsidies did NOT consider those tax-related subsidies. Rather, it looked at the phasing out of the (IEA-estimated) $557 billion provided in 2008 by developing and emerging economies (including two OECD countries, Korea and Mexico). The data on tax expenditures and production subsidies are not yet sufficiently complete and robust to model their phase-out.
Finally, when comparing total subsidies across energy sources, it is also important to look at them in terms of the subsidy per unit of energy. Viewed in that way, subsidies for renewable energy are, on average, far higher per unit of energy produced than those to fossil fuels.
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