Fossil fuel subsidies amount to hundreds of billions of dollars a year – here's how to get rid of them

By Neil McCulloch, Associate Fellow of Political Economy, Institute of Development Studies
Radek Stefanski, Senior Lecturer in Economics, University of St Andrews

Any feasible pathway out of the climate crisis involves dramatically lowering our consumption of fossil fuels. It’s astonishing, then, that many countries not only don’t reflect the damage caused by burning fossil fuels in the taxes imposed on them, but actively subsidise their extraction and use. Despite an agreement at the G20 in 2009 to eliminate fossil fuel subsidies, the US, China and Russia alone spent US$909 billion (£656 billion) on them in 2017, the most recent year available –

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