Why not just withdraw fossil fuel subsidies?
Good reasons abound for zeroing out tax breaks, lease loopholes and other giveaways to the fossil fuel industry. The impact on fossil fuel use, however, would barely be noticeable. Authoritative sources such as EarthTrack place the industry’s tax and fiscal subsidies at around $25 billion a year, a figure that pales beside the roughly $1,000 billion (one trillion dollars) paid annually for coal, oil and natural gas burned in the U.S. Withdrawing those subsidies would lead to at most a 2-3 percent rise in the market prices of fossil fuels — scant incentive to reduce their use and concomitant emissions of CO2.
