The next time you hear or read some wag, random solar-hater, or shill for a dirty fossil fuel company (like “natural gas”, really, explosive methane), or the likes of Spectra Energy bemoan the subsidies states like Massachusetts and New York are giving to zero Carbon energy, like residential solar, commercial solar, wind, and energy storage, remember this little fact. Massachusetts exports billions of dollars to fossil fuel companies in other states. There these companies pull down all kinds of benefits, like the Master Limited Partnership which is, by statute, not available to solar and wind energy sources.
TORONTO (Thomson Reuters Foundation) – Wealthy nations spend 40 times as much money subsidizing fossil fuel production as they contribute to the Green Climate Fund to help poor countries adapt to global warming, a research group said in a study released on Thursday.
Eight industrialized nations – Australia, Canada, France, Germany, Italy, Japan, the United Kingdom and the United States – spend a combined $80 billion a year on public support for fossil fuel production, but have pledged only about $2 billion a year to the Green Climate Fund, Oil Change International said.
“Eliminating fossil fuel subsidies could be a massive double win,” Alex Doukas, the group’s senior campaigner, said in a statement on the research analysis.
(Reporting By Chris Arsenault, editing by Tim Pearce. Please credit the Thomson Reuters Foundation, the charitable arm of Thomson Reuters, that covers humanitarian news, women’s rights, trafficking, corruption and climate change. Visit http://www.trust.org)
ecoquant
667 per centimeter : climate science, quantitative biology, statistics, and energy policy 