Damning Study Shows Govts Rob Taxpayers $5 Trillion a Year to Keep Fossil Fuel Industry Going

As the global energy paradigm is undergoing the next great transition from fossil fuels to renewable energy, a new report shows that fossil fuels continue to be propped up by governments with staggering amounts of subsidies.

A study published in the World Development journal, by researchers from the International Monetary Fund (IMF), found that fossil fuel subsidies amounted to $5.3 trillion dollars in 2015, rising from $4.9 trillion in 2013. This amounts to 6.5 percent of global GDP.

The authors use an expanded view of subsidies, not only “direct financial cost that result in consumers paying a price that is below the opportunity cost of the product” but also externalized, hidden costs. These hidden costs include environmental damage from air and water pollution, and damage to human health from the burning of fossil fuels, as well as “taxes applied to consumer goods in general.”

The cost of fossil fuels to human health is estimated at $74.6 billion a year; the environmental costs are more difficult to quantify but no less important, as human health depends on healthy ecosystems. The cost of U.S. military protection of overseas oil sources amounts to as much as $1 per gallon at the pump.

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It is absolutely justifiable to include these hidden costs of fossil fuels as subsidies. Every economist knows that externalized costs matter, and in the case of fossil fuels these are not shouldered by the coal and oil industries profiting from their extraction. These costs are placed on consumers via the state, and they must be quantified to achieve a true picture.

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According to The Guardian:

“[T]he authors discuss both consumer subsidies (when the price paid by a consumer is below a benchmark price) and producer subsidies (when producers receive direct or indirect support which increases their profitability). The authors then quantify what benefits would be achieved if the fossil fuel subsidies were reformed…

Pre-tax (the narrow view of subsidies) subsidies amount to 0.7% of global GDP in 2011 and 2013. But the more appropriate definition of subsidies is much larger (8 times larger than the pre-tax subsidies). We are talking enormous values of 5.8% of global GDP in 2011, rising to 6.5% in 2013.”

The authors also note that, unsurprisingly, coal and oil receive the most subsidies, and that China, USA and Russia are the top three subsidizers of fossil fuels.

For some in the U.S. coal industry, this is not enough. West Virginia governor and long-time coal baron, Jim Justice, is in discussions with President Trump about having the federal government (taxpayers) pay a direct subsidy of $15/ton to Appalachian coal. Justice cites bogus “national security” threats for his proposal, but it’s really about using government to prop up the dying eastern U.S. coal industry. Workers in that region would be far better served diversifying into renewable energy, which provides five times more jobs than coal.

It’s important to note that coal is going down due to market forces, not a fictitious “war on coal.” The rapid fall of natural gas prices that came with the fracking boom is the primary threat to coal. In addition, wind and solar energy prices are crashing due to leaps in technology.

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A third factor is flattening energy demand due to rising efficiency. No new regulations were put on coal since the 1970s — including during the rapid 5-year decline of coal — until Obama-era rules began going into effect in 2016.

On the subject of subsidies, it is certainly true that renewable energies have received subsidies as well, although the aforementioned study shows that they are dwarfed by fossil fuel subsidies. The externalized costs of fossil fuels in terms of damage to human and environmental health, military protection of overseas oil sources must be factored into the equation.

The fact is, renewable energy is now competitive or even cheaper than fossil fuels due to market forces – not subsidies. And this trend will continue as renewable prices keep falling due to rapid technology advances, despite the best efforts of administrations allied with the fossil fuel industry. Renewable energy is also an incredible economic machine, as solar and wind jobs are now growing 12 times faster than the U.S. economy.

To make the right choices concerning our energy paradigm, we must have accurate information, as study author Dr. David Coady notes.

“A key motivation for the paper was to increase awareness among policy makers and the public of the large subsidies that arise from pricing fossil fuels below their true social costs—this broader definition of subsidies accounts for the many negative side effects associated with the consumption of these fuels. By estimating these costs on a global scale, we hope to stimulate an informed policy debate and provide renewed impetus for policy reforms to reap the large potential benefits from more efficient pricing of fossil fuels in terms of improved public finances, improved population health and lower carbon emissions.”

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It is past time to break fossil fuel’s grip on government, which appears to be the primary reason why fossil fuels are being sustained as top energy sources. If the true price of coal and oil were known to consumers – instead of being hidden through subsidies, taxes, military costs, and health and environmental costs – we would be much farther into the transition to renewable energy.

China Now Home to the World’s Largest Floating Solar Plant

In the beginning of June 2017, workers brought a solar energy plant online capable of producing 40 megawatts of power. That’s cool all by itself, but this solar “farm” floats on a manmade lake in China’s Anhui province, and it is the largest floating solar project in the world. [1]

The massive power plant was built by Sungrow Power Supply, and can produce enough energy to power 15,000 homes. The exact size of the operation has not been revealed, but it produces twice as much energy as the previous holder of the largest-floating-solar-plant title, which was launched by Xinyi Solar in 2016.

Building solar plants on bodies of water helps prevent agricultural land and terrestrial ecosystems from being developed for energy use – especially manmade lakes that are not ecologically sensitive. The water cools the electronics in the solar panels, which helps them work more efficiently.

Britain did the same thing for similar reasons in 2016 when it built a 23,000-panel floating solar farm on the Queen Elizabeth II reservoir near Heathrow Airport. The plant helps power the Thames Water treatment plant. The solar farm in Anhui province consists of 160,000 solar panels.

China is beginning to lead the world in clean energy investment, and the nation is projected to get 20% of its power consumption from low-emission energy by 2030. [2]

China Still Stricken by Toxic Air

China is plagued by toxic air pollution – smog is such a problem that the country expects to have more than 800,000 cases of lung cancer a year by 2020. The city of Beijing is currently the world’s top carbon emitter, with 2/3 of its electricity still fueled by coal. [3]

Source: Yale Center for Environmental Law & Policy

But the country has been working on innovative ways of fighting pollution. In 2018, Nanjing, China, is expected to start building Nanjing Green Towers, 2 buildings that will serve as vertical forests stylized with about 1,100 trees and more than 2,500 various shrubs and plants. The towers will absorb enough carbon dioxide to create 132 pounds of oxygen daily.

Though China’s floating solar energy plant is the largest of its type in the world, it pales in comparison to the land-locked Longyangxia Dam Solar Park, which hosts 4 million solar panels – together producing 850 megawatts of energy. And that project will eventually pale in comparison to a project in the Ningxia Autonomous Region, which will house more than 6 million solar panels and produce 2 gigawatts of power.

Sources:

[1] Smithsonian.com

[2] Mother Nature Network

[3] Phys.org

Yale Center for Environmental Law & Policy

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About Julie Fidler:
	Julie Fidler is a freelance writer, legal blogger, and the author of Adventures in Holy Matrimony: For Better or the Absolute Worst. She lives in Pennsylvania with her husband and two ridiculously spoiled cats. She occasionally pontificates on her blog.

"Tone Policing" And The Left's Anger Privelege

Authored by Daniel Greenfield via CanadaFreePress.com,

If you want to know who has privilege in a society and who doesn’t, follow the anger...

There are people in this country who can safely express their anger. And those who can’t. If you’re angry that Trump won, your anger is socially acceptable. If you were angry that Obama won, it wasn’t.

James Hodgkinson’s rage was socially acceptable. It continued to be socially acceptable until he crossed the line into murder. And he’s not alone. There’s Micah Xavier Johnson, the Black Lives Matter cop-killer in Dallas, and Gavin Long, the Black Lives Matter cop-killer in Baton Rouge. If you’re black and angry about the police, your anger is celebrated. If you’re white and angry about the Terror travel ban, the Paris Climate treaty, ObamaCare repeal or any leftist cause, you’re on the side of the angry angels. But if you’re white and angry that your job is going to China or that you just missed being killed in a Muslim suicide bombing, your anger is unacceptable.

If you’re an angry leftist, your party leader, Tom Perez will scream and curse into a microphone, and your aspiring presidential candidate, Kirsten Gillibrand, will curse along, to channel the anger of the base. But if you’re an angry conservative, then Trump channeling your anger is “dangerous” because you aren’t allowed to be angry.

Not all anger is created equal. Some anger is privileged rage.

Good anger gets you a gig as a CNN commentator. Bad anger gets you hounded out of your job. Good anger isn’t described as anger at all. Instead it’s linguistically whitewashed as “passionate” or “courageous”. Bad anger however is “worrying” or “dangerous”. Angry left-wing protesters “call out”, angry right-wing protesters “threaten”. Good anger is left-wing. Bad anger is right-wing.

Socially acceptable displays of anger, from Occupy Wall Street to Black Lives Matter riots to the anti-Trump marches to the furious campus protests, are invariably left-wing.

Left-wing anger over the elections of Bush and Trump was sanctified. Right-wing outrage over Obama’s victory was demonized. Now that left-wing anger led a Bernie Sanders volunteer to open fire at a Republican charity baseball practice outing. And the media reluctantly concedes that maybe both sides should moderate their rhetoric. Before listing examples that lean to the right like “Lock her up”.

Not all anger is created equal. Anger, like everything else, is ideologically coded

Why were chants of “Lock her up” immoderate, but not Bush era cries of “Jail to the chief”?

Why were Tea Party rallies “ominous” but the latest We Hate Trump march is “courageous”?

Why is killing Trump on stage the hottest thing to hit Shakespeare while a rodeo clown who wore an Obama mask was hounded by everyone from the Lieutenant Governor of Missouri to the NAACP?

Not all anger is created equal. Anger, like everything else, is ideologically coded. Left-wing anger is good because its ideological foundations are good. Right-wing anger is bad because its ideology is bad.

It’s not the level of anger, its intensity or its threatening nature that makes it good or bad.

And that is why the left so easily slips into violence. All its ideological ends are good. Therefore its means, from mass starvation to gulags to riots and tyranny, must be good. If I slash your tires because of your Obama bumper sticker, I’m a monster. But if you key my car because of my Trump bumper sticker, you’re fighting racism and fascism. Your tactics might be in error, but your viewpoint isn’t.

There are no universal standards of behavior. Civility, like everything else, is ideologically limited.

Tone policing is how the anger of privileged leftists is protected while the frustration of their victims is suppressed

Intersectionality frowns on expecting civil behavior from “oppressed” protesters. Asking that shrieking campus crybully not to scream threats in your face is “tone policing”. An African-American millionaire’s child at Yale is fighting for her “existence”, unlike the Pennsylvania coal miner, the Baltimore police officer and the Christian florist whose existences really are threatened.

Tone policing is how the anger of privileged leftists is protected while the frustration of their victims is suppressed. The existence of tone policing as a specific term to protect displays of left-wing anger shows the collapse of civility into anger privilege. Civility has been replaced by a political entitlement to anger.

The left prides itself on an unearned moral superiority (“When they go low, we go high”) reinforced by its own echo chamber even as it has become incapable of controlling its angry outbursts. The national tantrum after Trump’s victory has all but shut down the government, turned every media outlet into a non-stop feed of conspiracy theories and set off protests that quickly escalated into street violence.

But Trump Derangement Syndrome is a symptom of a problem with the left that existed before he was born. The left is an angry movement. It is animated by an outraged self-righteousness whose moral superiority doubles as dehumanization. And its machinery of culture glamorizes its anger. The media dresses up the seething rage so that the left never has to look at its inner Hodgkinson in the mirror.

The angry left has gained a great deal of power

The left is as angry as ever. Campus riots and assassinations of Republican politicians are nothing new. What is changing is that its opponents are beginning to match its anger. The left still clings to the same anger it had when it was a theoretical movement with plans, but little impact on the country. The outrage at the left is no longer ideological. There are millions of people whose health care was destroyed by ObamaCare, whose First Amendment rights were taken away, whose land was seized, whose children were turned against them and whose livelihoods were destroyed.

The angry left has gained a great deal of power. It has used that power to wreck lives. It is feverishly plotting to deprive nearly 63 million Americans of their vote by using its entrenched power in the government, the media and the non-profit sector. And it is too blinded by its own anger over the results of the election to realize the anger over its wholesale abuses of power and privileged tantrums.

But monopolies on anger only work in totalitarian states. In a free society, both sides are expected to control their anger and find terms on which to debate and settle issues. The left rejects civility and refuses to control its anger. The only settlement it will accept is absolute power. If an election doesn’t go its way, it will overturn the results. If someone offends it, he must be punished. Or there will be anger.

The angry left demands that everyone recognize the absolute righteousness of its anger as the basis for its power. This anger privilege, like tone policing, is often cast in terms of oppressed groups. But its anger isn’t in defiance of oppression, but in pursuit of oppression.

Anger privilege is used to silence opposition, to enforce illegal policies and to seize power. But the left’s monopolies on anger are cultural, not political. The entertainment industry and the media can enforce anger privilege norms through public shaming, but their smears can’t stop the consequences of the collapse of civility in public life. There are no monopolies on emotion.

James Hodgkinson absorbed all this. The left fed his anger. And eventually he snapped

When anger becomes the basis for political power, then it won’t stop with Howard Dean or Bernie Sanders. That’s what the left found out in the last election. Its phony pearl clutching was a reaction to the consequences of its destruction of civility. Its reaction to that show of anger by conservatives and independents was to escalate the conflict. Instead of being the opposition, the left became the “resistance”. Trump was simultaneously Hitler and a traitor. Republicans were evil beasts.

James Hodgkinson absorbed all this. The left fed his anger. And eventually he snapped.

Anger has to go somewhere.

The left likes to think that its anger is good anger because it’s angry over the plight of illegal aliens, Muslim terrorists, transgender bathrooms, the lack of abortion in South Carolina, the minimum wage at Taco Bell, budget cuts, tax cuts, police arrests, drone strikes and all the other ways in which reality differs from its utopia. But all that anger isn’t the road to a better world, but to hate and violence.

Millions of leftists, just like Hodgkinson, are told every day that Republicans are responsible for everything wrong with their lives, the country and the planet. Despite everything they do, all the petitions they sign, the marches they attend, the donations, the angry letters, the social media rants, Republicans continue to exist and even be elected to public office. Where does that anger go?

Leftist anger is a privileged bubble of entitlement that bursts every other election

Either we have a political system based on existing laws and norms of civility. Or we have one based on coups and populist leftist anger. And there are already a whole bunch of those south of the border.

Leftist anger is a privileged bubble of entitlement that bursts every other election. Its choice is to try to understand the rest of the country or to intimidate, censor, oppress and eventually kill them.

James Hodgkinson took the latter course. His personal leftist revolution ended, as all leftist revolutions do, in blood and violence. The left can check its anger privilege and examine its entitlement.

Or his violence will be our future.

Making Coal Great Again

It was a busy week at the coal-face.

On Monday, BP"s annual review of global energy trends showed that coal production dropped by record numbers in 2016.

Coal production fell off by 231 million tonnes of oil equivalent (mtoe), a unit of energy common in the energy industry, roughly the equivalent of 6.2 percent of all coal on Earth.

As PopularMechanics.com reports, the decline was most prominent in two of the planet"s largest powers, the United States and China. The U.S, which elected a president dedicated to reviving the coal industry, saw production fall by 33 mtoe, an 8.8 percent fall in total usage. China, which is aggressively pursuing renewable energy, saw a drop off of 26 mtoe, a 1.6 percent change. The UK, which began a transition program to low carbon energy usage in 2009, more than halved its usage of coal, a 52.5 percent down to 12 mtoe, bringing it to its lowest levels in BP"s recorded history.

In a separate report from the U.S. Energy Information Administration (EIA) on Friday, officials noted that U.S. coal consumption in 2016 — 677 million short tons — is the lowest figure since 1984.

Then, on Tuesday, President Trump proudly tweeted about the opening of the first new coal mine in recent memory...

Congratulations!

"First New Coal Mine of Trump Era Opens in Pennsylvania" https://t.co/aIRllxNLQA

— Donald J. Trump (@realDonaldTrump) June 12, 2017

Corsa Coal Company will operate the mine in Somerset County, Pa. - outside of Pittsburgh. Corsa CEO George Dethlefsen said the mine will be a boon to the struggling local economy. He praised Trump"s easing of regulations and encouragement for fossil fuel exploration. Dethlefsen told Leland Vittert that for the 70 positions available in the mine, 400 people applied.

"It"s a hard day"s work every day, but it"s worth it," one miner said.

Vittert said the news contrasts with Hillary Clinton"s message that she would "put a lot of coal miners out of work."

Pennsylvania Gov. Tom Wolf (D), who endorsed Clinton, joined the mine company in watching a video message from Trump commemorating the occasion.

And then on Thursday, we got Industrial Production data showing that Coal Mining Production is exploding...

h/t @DonDraperClone

Make Coal Great Again indeed... though of course the base effect may slow this exuberance dramatically.

Can Trump Turn Back Time On Coal Mining Employment?

President Trump signed an executive order on Tuesday, repealing many of the environmental regulations introduced by his predecessor Barack Obama and rescinding a moratorium on the leasing of federal land to coal mining companies. In “ending the war on coal”, Trump tries to make good on his campaign promise to bring thousands of unemployed coal miners back to work and secure U.S. energy independence.

As Statista"s Felix Richter notes, Trump, like many of his supporters, blames Obama’s environmental policies for the coal industry’s decline, which, as the chart below illustrates, started long before Obama took office in 2009. While it is true that coal consumption and mining employment did drop significantly during Obama’s presidency, experts keep pointing out that the decline was caused primarily by the rise of natural gas and only secondarily by environmental regulation.

You will find more statistics at Statista

In the late 2000s, a boom in natural gas production, driven by new hydraulic fracturing (fracking) technology, drove down prices for natural gas and the demand for electricity produced from coal subsequently plummeted. In 2000, coal accounted for more than 50 percent of U.S. electricity generation. By 2016, that percentage had dropped to around 30 percent with natural gas going the opposite direction. When natural gas surpassed coal for the first time in 2016, the EIA concluded that the rise of gas “was mainly a market-driven response to lower natural gas prices that have made natural gas generation more economically attractive”.

Repealing environmental regulation will likely slow down the decline of the coal industry, but it is highly doubtful that it will reverse a trend that has been ongoing for decades. By easing fracking limitations, President Trump’s anti-regulation policy may even worsen the coal industry’s situation as laxer extraction rules could drive down the price of natural gas even further.