[bluejekyll]

It really depends on how you calculate this, but fossil fuels are not cheap by any means. The IMF has some staggering numbers for direct and indirect subsidies of fossil fuels, https://www.imf.org/en/Blogs/Articles/2023/08/24/fossil-fuel...: “… explicit subsidies (undercharging for supply costs) more than doubled to $1.3 trillion.” If we just got rid of those subsidies, we’d see a faster shift.

Then there are all the externalities that are not part of the cost of fossil fuel costs today, start charging for the pollution and make the real costs explicit. The next thing, stop subsidizing road construction and maintenance for car drivers, and make only car owners pay the costs of all the roads, people would again see more explicitly how much more expensive cars are, which would get people to shift to other options (the vast majority of which are not EVs and won’t be for a long time). People might opt to bike for anything shorter than a 3 mile errand, deeming the car to be too expensive, or use the local bus or transit system…

Point being, these fossil fuels are supported directly by our governments and many of the primary users of those fuels are also supported by our governments (some more than others like here in the US).

[vel0city]

You're misquoting with your explicit subsidies. Undercharging is an implicit, not explicit. The vast majority of these subsidies are implicit subsidies. "Getting rid of" these subsidies means taxing an extra trillion dollars not scaling back something handing the oil companies a trillion dollars.

If you want to argue we should levy a trillion dollar tax on fossil fuels that's fine but let's at least be direct about it instead of the somewhat misleading statement that it's a subsidy, like it's some giant pile of cash the state is handing to the oil companies. It's not even that it's giving tax breaks (that would be an explicit subsidy), it's that these taxes didn't exist at all.

You're essentially arguing not being taxed to oblivion as being directly supported by the government.

[bluejekyll]

Am I misquoting that? I read that report as saying that the implicit costs are about $7 trillion dollars, and the explicit subsidies are $1.3 trillion, which is the number I used in the quote because, I agree, the implicit costs are harder to understand.

[vel0city]

I double checksd the source and you're right that isn't a misquote, but it isn't quite accurate in the end. A lot of the "undercharging" is essentially not making new taxes. Most of the explicit subsidies are subsidies that pretty much any large business gets, nothing special about the oil industry there. Things like local tax deferments for plants that supposedly bring jobs to an area are common for just about any large employer. Maybe we shouldn't be doing this in general, but it's not something special to oil industries.

We should probably just end all of those "subsidies" and loopholes in general.

Sorry for misunderstanding and missing what you were quoting. My overall point still kind of stands though, a lot of these "the government is subsidizing the oil industry trillions of dollars" is usually talking about these implicit costs that aren't taxed like they'd like.