[lispisok]

I knew somebody was going to regurgitate this.

That's if you make up some number for fossil fuel externalities and count it as a subsidy. Pollution from fossil fuels is a very real and very big issue but it has been presented in such a way that people think governments are actually giving oil companies trillions of dollars in direct subsidies. No other business has had this kind of math applied to it. The fossil fuel industry is taxed heavily from when the oil comes out of the ground to people pumping gas into their cars, it is a huge tax revenue generator.

I really want to emphasizes the "make up a number" part. Trying to understand the physical part of climate change is already a monstrous task with big uncertainty. From there trying to to estimate economic effects is basically impossible.

[_Algernon_]

Big [citation needed]

[vbeeaz]

Citation needed for that number, I suppose, because the number is absolutely made up. There is no way to determine the cost of the externalities of fossil fuels (if they exist). Even if we were to say that CO2 is causing global warming so we need to remove it from the atmosphere, such technology does not yet exist, so we don't know how much it would cost.