Maine Today
February 1, 2007
Norm Anderson
Over the years, we have become accustomed to the use of the term "watershed moment" to describe pivotal times in our history.
We want to be sure that last week's decision by the Land Use Regulation Commission to deny the Redington Wind Project is not an "airshed moment" that stops wind-power development in its infancy.
In consideration of the increasing danger of air pollution, our continued dependence on fossil fuel and the unmistakable effects of global warming, Maine must move rapidly forward to encourage significant expansion of wind power.
The American Lung Association of Maine was an early and ardent supporter of the Redington project. Despite that, we respect the LURC decision based on the criteria they must use.
SENSITIVE TO CONCERNS
We observed and participated in many of the LURC hearings at Sugarloaf this past summer and are sensitive to the concerns expressed in opposition to the proposal.
Many in the western mountains have adopted lifestyles that should be energy conservation models not only for the rest of Maine, but also for the rest of the country.
This illustrates the complexity of the problem we are facing, and, if truth be told, the injustice. Our quarrel is not with those who value the exquisite beauty of our mountain ridges, or who value the fragile ecology of alpine peaks. It is not with the Audubon Society or the Appalachian Mountain Club.
In fact, we are grateful to the great efforts of the AMC for its role in helping to better define the impacts of air pollution on people who enjoy the outdoors in this unique area.
Our quarrel is with the current condition in which we find ourselves. We have an increasingly narrow timeline in which to reverse our course.
In fact, some have stated that it may already be too late. We are losing islands in the South Pacific because of rising sea levels. The Arctic tundra is thawing. Even a cursory review of CNN will confirm that severe weather events are increasingly dominating our news coverage.
The association's particular concern -- rising air-pollution levels and the increasing probability of emerging infectious diseases -- is just one of the societal challenges we will have to confront.
Maine is replete with renewable sources of energy, including water, lumber, wind and solar. Even with these resources, however, almost 70 percent of the energy we consume is from fossil fuels. Natural gas alone accounts for over 50 percent of our electricity production.
Burning fossil fuels to support our energy and transportation systems produces greenhouse gases and air pollution. The result is global warming and ever-growing risks of lung disease.
Wind power is one of the remedies. Our study in partnership with Coastal Enterprise Institute and the Jebediah Foundation shows that small-scale community windmills are not a realistic option for significant power production at this time.
As a result, multiple large-scale projects are absolutely essential. We are most certainly running out of time and options to reverse the current trend toward an environmental and public health catastrophe.
While LURC's decision to disapprove Redington removes one wind project from the list of possibilities, commission members were careful to note that this action should not be misinterpreted as a vote against wind power elsewhere.
MORE WORTHY PROPOSALS
We take them at their word. With several new high-quality proposals in the pipeline, they will soon be able to demonstrate their support for wind power.
LURC's approval of a large-scale wind project will be a powerful precedent to forge a new path to energy independence, healthy air and healthy lungs.
This is not a choice among reducing our excessive energy consumption, mandating energy efficiency standards and promoting clean renewable energy sources.
The current situation demands we aggressively move forward on all these fronts. Determining the kind of world we are giving to our children and grandchildren is really at the core of this issue. We hope our legacy will be one where the very air we breathe is not dangerous to our health.
Friday, February 02, 2007
Thursday, February 01, 2007
Highway Exhaust Stunts Lung Growth, Study Finds
NY Times
January 30, 2007
By NICHOLAS BAKALAR
A new study suggests that children who grow up within a third of a mile of a freeway may be sustaining permanent respiratory problems.
Researchers studied developing lung function in 1,445 children living in 12 Southern California communities for eight years, from age 10 to 18. They found that the closer the children lived to a freeway, the more likely they were to experience reduced growth in lung function as measured by the standard tests.
“That living near freeways is a health issue is something we’ve known about for a long time,” said Gennet Paauwe, a spokeswoman for the California Air Resources Board, which financed part of the research. “All of this points to the fact that California’s air pollution control program needs to continue with its aggressive reduction in air pollutants. But I think this would translate to any other part of the U.S. where people are living near heavily trafficked roadways.”
The findings were published online Friday by the British journal Lancet.
“Our finding of a larger impact on small lung airways is consistent with what is known about the types of pollutants that are emitted from the tailpipe,” said W. James Gauderman, the lead author and an associate professor of preventive medicine at the University of Southern California. These pollutants, he continued, “can be inhaled deeply into the lung and may have the largest impact on the smallest lung airways.”
The study was not restricted to the notoriously smoggy Los Angeles basin. “Our findings were observed in all of these children, including those living in areas of lower pollution,” Dr. Gauderman said, “so it suggests that in any urban area where children are living near busy roads, they are likely to have adverse respiratory effects. It’s not just L. A.”
The development of lung function was also lower in nonasthmatic and nonsmoking teenagers living near freeways, suggesting that the highways had an adverse effect on otherwise healthy children. Growth of lung strength and capacity, the researchers write, is largely complete by age 18, and this means that a child with a deficit at that age will probably suffer lifelong diminished lung function.
“The study is significant in the finding that it isn’t just regional air pollution, which policy makers have focused on,” said Frederica Perera, director of the Columbia Center for Children’s Environmental Health at the Mailman School of Public Health in New York. “These results indicate that it’s also important to consider local variations in air pollution.”
The researchers started with a group of 3,600 children, using questionnaires to gather information on parental income, history of asthma, prenatal exposure to maternal smoking and household exposure to smoking and pets. Then, using yearly questionnaires, they tracked asthma status, personal smoking and exposure to secondhand smoke. They also recorded the distance of each child’s home from the nearest limited-access highway and from other major nonfreeway roads.
To determine lung function, the scientists used standard tests that measure how much air a child can exhale during a forced expiration and how forcefully he can do so. Normally, these numbers gradually increase as children grow. The children were tested an average of six times over the eight years of the study.
About 11 percent of subjects per year dropped out of the study for various reasons.
Although the authors controlled the study for socioeconomic status, an editorial with the paper points out that social factors are difficult to define and may affect lung capacity no matter where a child lives. Other studies, for example, have shown that poor children in the Los Angeles area are more likely to attend schools near freeways than those who are more affluent. Also, the study did not examine exposures at ages younger than 10.
January 30, 2007
By NICHOLAS BAKALAR
A new study suggests that children who grow up within a third of a mile of a freeway may be sustaining permanent respiratory problems.
Researchers studied developing lung function in 1,445 children living in 12 Southern California communities for eight years, from age 10 to 18. They found that the closer the children lived to a freeway, the more likely they were to experience reduced growth in lung function as measured by the standard tests.
“That living near freeways is a health issue is something we’ve known about for a long time,” said Gennet Paauwe, a spokeswoman for the California Air Resources Board, which financed part of the research. “All of this points to the fact that California’s air pollution control program needs to continue with its aggressive reduction in air pollutants. But I think this would translate to any other part of the U.S. where people are living near heavily trafficked roadways.”
The findings were published online Friday by the British journal Lancet.
“Our finding of a larger impact on small lung airways is consistent with what is known about the types of pollutants that are emitted from the tailpipe,” said W. James Gauderman, the lead author and an associate professor of preventive medicine at the University of Southern California. These pollutants, he continued, “can be inhaled deeply into the lung and may have the largest impact on the smallest lung airways.”
The study was not restricted to the notoriously smoggy Los Angeles basin. “Our findings were observed in all of these children, including those living in areas of lower pollution,” Dr. Gauderman said, “so it suggests that in any urban area where children are living near busy roads, they are likely to have adverse respiratory effects. It’s not just L. A.”
The development of lung function was also lower in nonasthmatic and nonsmoking teenagers living near freeways, suggesting that the highways had an adverse effect on otherwise healthy children. Growth of lung strength and capacity, the researchers write, is largely complete by age 18, and this means that a child with a deficit at that age will probably suffer lifelong diminished lung function.
“The study is significant in the finding that it isn’t just regional air pollution, which policy makers have focused on,” said Frederica Perera, director of the Columbia Center for Children’s Environmental Health at the Mailman School of Public Health in New York. “These results indicate that it’s also important to consider local variations in air pollution.”
The researchers started with a group of 3,600 children, using questionnaires to gather information on parental income, history of asthma, prenatal exposure to maternal smoking and household exposure to smoking and pets. Then, using yearly questionnaires, they tracked asthma status, personal smoking and exposure to secondhand smoke. They also recorded the distance of each child’s home from the nearest limited-access highway and from other major nonfreeway roads.
To determine lung function, the scientists used standard tests that measure how much air a child can exhale during a forced expiration and how forcefully he can do so. Normally, these numbers gradually increase as children grow. The children were tested an average of six times over the eight years of the study.
About 11 percent of subjects per year dropped out of the study for various reasons.
Although the authors controlled the study for socioeconomic status, an editorial with the paper points out that social factors are difficult to define and may affect lung capacity no matter where a child lives. Other studies, for example, have shown that poor children in the Los Angeles area are more likely to attend schools near freeways than those who are more affluent. Also, the study did not examine exposures at ages younger than 10.
Study Finds Gritty Air Raises Heart Disease Risk in Older Women
NY Times
February 1, 2007
By THE ASSOCIATED PRESS
BOSTON, Jan. 31 (AP) — The fine grit in polluted air increases the risk of heart disease in older women much more sharply than scientists realized, a federally financed study has found, raising questions of whether environmental standards are strict enough.
The Environmental Protection Agency tightened its daily limit for the tiny specks, or fine particulates, in September.
But the new standard left the average annual limit untouched, allowing a concentration of 15 millionths of a gram for every cubic meter of air.
In this study of 65,893 women, the average exposure was 13 millionths, with two-thirds of the subjects falling under the national standard.
But every increase of 10 millionths, starting at zero, increased the risk of fatal cardiovascular disease by about 75 percent. That is several times higher than in a study by the American Cancer Society.
“There was a lot of evidence previously suggesting that the long-term standard should be lower, and this is adding one more study to that evidence,” said Douglas Dockery, a pollution specialist at the Harvard School of Public Health.
Dr. Dockery wrote an accompanying editorial for the study, which is in the Thursday issue of The New England Journal of Medicine.
The researchers, based at the University of Washington, worked from data collected for the Women’s Health Initiative, a research project that previously showed the heart dangers of hormone supplements.
It has long been known that particulates can contribute to lung and heart disease, with women perhaps more susceptible than men to heart problems, perhaps because of their smaller blood vessels and other biological differences.
But the degree of risk for older women was less clear. This study started with women who had gone through menopause and were 50 to 79 years old.
Unlike earlier studies, it looked not just at deaths, but also at heart attacks, coronary disease, strokes and clogged arteries.
Those problems were 24 percent more likely with every 10-unit increase in particles. Almost 3 percent of the women had some kind of cardiovascular problem.
The risk varied along with the varying levels of these particles in different neighborhoods in the same city.
In their calculations, the researchers tried to adjust for lower income and other health problems that have been blamed for the higher rates of disease in past studies.
“I think the major contribution is answering the critics of the prior studies,” said the paper’s senior researcher, Dr. Joel Kaufman of the University of Washington.
“The effect,” Dr. Kaufman said, “seems large and important and should be taken seriously.”
States and other groups demanding a lower annual standard sued the E.P.A. last year, accusing it of disregarding the advice of its own scientists. Some agency scientists are also pushing for tighter rules on ozone, the chemical that creates smog and contributes to asthma and lung disease. The E.P.A. is scheduled to take another look at its standard for particulate matter and finish it by 2011.
The grit is thought to reach deep into the lungs to spur inflammation that leads to heart attack and stroke. It would take about 30 particles to equal the thickness of a human hair.
The particles, made of dust, soot and various chemicals, come from burning fuel in cars, factories and power plants. While individual particles are too small to see, they can be observed collectively as urban haze.
February 1, 2007
By THE ASSOCIATED PRESS
BOSTON, Jan. 31 (AP) — The fine grit in polluted air increases the risk of heart disease in older women much more sharply than scientists realized, a federally financed study has found, raising questions of whether environmental standards are strict enough.
The Environmental Protection Agency tightened its daily limit for the tiny specks, or fine particulates, in September.
But the new standard left the average annual limit untouched, allowing a concentration of 15 millionths of a gram for every cubic meter of air.
In this study of 65,893 women, the average exposure was 13 millionths, with two-thirds of the subjects falling under the national standard.
But every increase of 10 millionths, starting at zero, increased the risk of fatal cardiovascular disease by about 75 percent. That is several times higher than in a study by the American Cancer Society.
“There was a lot of evidence previously suggesting that the long-term standard should be lower, and this is adding one more study to that evidence,” said Douglas Dockery, a pollution specialist at the Harvard School of Public Health.
Dr. Dockery wrote an accompanying editorial for the study, which is in the Thursday issue of The New England Journal of Medicine.
The researchers, based at the University of Washington, worked from data collected for the Women’s Health Initiative, a research project that previously showed the heart dangers of hormone supplements.
It has long been known that particulates can contribute to lung and heart disease, with women perhaps more susceptible than men to heart problems, perhaps because of their smaller blood vessels and other biological differences.
But the degree of risk for older women was less clear. This study started with women who had gone through menopause and were 50 to 79 years old.
Unlike earlier studies, it looked not just at deaths, but also at heart attacks, coronary disease, strokes and clogged arteries.
Those problems were 24 percent more likely with every 10-unit increase in particles. Almost 3 percent of the women had some kind of cardiovascular problem.
The risk varied along with the varying levels of these particles in different neighborhoods in the same city.
In their calculations, the researchers tried to adjust for lower income and other health problems that have been blamed for the higher rates of disease in past studies.
“I think the major contribution is answering the critics of the prior studies,” said the paper’s senior researcher, Dr. Joel Kaufman of the University of Washington.
“The effect,” Dr. Kaufman said, “seems large and important and should be taken seriously.”
States and other groups demanding a lower annual standard sued the E.P.A. last year, accusing it of disregarding the advice of its own scientists. Some agency scientists are also pushing for tighter rules on ozone, the chemical that creates smog and contributes to asthma and lung disease. The E.P.A. is scheduled to take another look at its standard for particulate matter and finish it by 2011.
The grit is thought to reach deep into the lungs to spur inflammation that leads to heart attack and stroke. It would take about 30 particles to equal the thickness of a human hair.
The particles, made of dust, soot and various chemicals, come from burning fuel in cars, factories and power plants. While individual particles are too small to see, they can be observed collectively as urban haze.
SUBSIDIZING CLIMATE CHANGE
Earth Policy Institute
Plan B 2.0 Book Byte
For Immediate Release
February 1, 2007
http://www.earth-policy.org/Books/Seg/PB2ch04_ss7.htm
Lester R. Brown
Each year the world’s taxpayers provide an estimated $700 billion of subsidies for environmentally destructive activities, such as fossil fuel burning, overpumping aquifers, clearcutting forests, and overfishing. An Earth Council study, Subsidizing Unsustainable Development, observes that “there is something unbelievable about the world spending hundreds of billions of dollars annually to subsidize its own destruction.”
Iran provides a classic example of extreme subsidies when it prices oil for internal use at one tenth the world price, strongly encouraging car ownership and gas consumption. The World Bank reports that if this $3.6-billion annual subsidy were phased out, it would reduce Iran’s carbon emissions by a staggering 49 percent. It would also strengthen the economy by freeing up public revenues for investment in the country’s economic development. Iran is not alone. The Bank reports that removing energy subsidies would reduce carbon emissions in Venezuela by 26 percent, in Russia by 17 percent, in India by 14 percent, and in Indonesia by 11 percent.
Some countries are eliminating or reducing these climate-disrupting subsidies. Belgium, France, and Japan have phased out all subsidies for coal. Germany reduced its coal subsidy from $5.4 billion in 1989 to $2.8 billion in 2002, meanwhile lowering its coal use by 46 percent. It plans to phase out this support entirely by 2010. China cut its coal subsidy from $750 million in 1993 to $240 million in 1995. More recently, it has imposed a tax on high-sulfur coals.
A study by the U.K. Green Party, “Aviation’s Economic Downside,” describes the extent of subsidies currently given to the U.K. airline industry. The giveaway begins with $17 billion in tax breaks, including a total exemption from the federal tax. External or indirect costs that are not paid, such as treating illness from breathing the air polluted by planes, the costs of climate change, and so forth, add nearly $7 billion to the tab. The subsidy in the United Kingdom totals $391 per resident. This is also an inherently regressive tax policy simply because a substantial share of the U.K. population cannot afford to fly very often if at all, yet they help subsidize this high-cost mode of transportation for their more affluent compatriots.
While some leading industrial countries have been reducing subsidies to fossil fuels—notably coal, the most climate disrupting of all fuels—the United States has been increasing its support for the fossil fuel and nuclear industries. A Green Scissors report from 2002, a study supported by a coalition of environmental groups, calculated that over the preceding 10 years subsidies for the energy industry totaled $33 billion. Of that, the oil and gas industry got $26 billion, coal $3 billion, and nuclear $4 billion. At a time when there is a need to conserve oil resources, U.S. taxpayers are subsidizing their depletion.
Subsidies are not inherently bad. Many technologies and industries were born of government subsidies. Jet aircraft developed with military R&D expenditures led to modern commercial airliners. The Internet was the result of publicly funded links among computers in government laboratories and research institutes. And the combination of the federal tax deduction and a robust state tax deduction in California gave birth to the modern wind power industry.
There is an urgent need for subsidy shifting. Eliminating environmentally destructive subsidies reduces both the burden on taxpayers and the destructive activities themselves. A world facing the prospect of economically disruptive climate change, for example, can no longer justify subsidies to expand the burning of coal and oil. Shifting these subsidies to the development of climate-benign energy sources such as wind, solar, biomass, and geothermal power is the key to stabilizing the earth’s climate. Shifting subsidies from road construction to rail construction could increase mobility in many situations while reducing carbon emissions.
In a troubled world economy facing fiscal deficits at all levels of government, exploiting these subsidy shifts, as well as tax shifts, can help balance the books and save the economy’s environmental support systems. Subsidy and tax shifting promise both gains in economic efficiency and reductions in environmental destruction, a win-win situation.
At a time of mounting public concern about climate change driven by the burning of fossil fuels, the world fossil fuel industry is still being subsidized by taxpayers at more than $210 billion per year. Fossil fuel subsidies belong to another age, a time when development of the oil and coal industries was seen as a key to economic progress—not as a threat to our twenty-first century civilization. Once in place, subsidies lead to special interest lobbies that fight tooth and nail against eliminating them, even those that were not appropriate in the first place.
In the United States, oil and gas companies are now perhaps the most powerful lobbyists in Washington. Between 1990 and 2004, they amassed $181 million in campaign contributions in an effort to protect special tax deductions worth billions. In testimony before the House Ways and Means Committee in 1999, Donald Lubick, U.S. Treasury Assistant Secretary for Tax Policy, said in reference to oil and gas companies: “This is an industry that probably has a larger tax incentive relative to its size than any other industry in the country.” That such profitable investments are possible is a measure of the corruption of the U.S. political system, particularly the capacity of those with money to shape the economy to their advantage.
Subsidies permeate and distort every corner of the global economy. Germany’s coal mining subsidy was initially justified in part as a job protection measure, for example. At its peak, the government was subsidizing the industry to the tune of nearly $90,000 per year for each worker. In purely economic terms, it would have made more sense to close the mines and pay miners not to work.
Many subsidies are largely hidden from taxpayers. This is especially true of the fossil fuel industry, whose subsidies include such things as a depletion allowance for oil pumping in the United States. Even more dramatic are the routine U.S. military expenditures to protect access to Middle Eastern oil, which were calculated by analysts at the Rand Corporation before the most recent Iraq war to fall between $30 billion and $60 billion a year, while the oil imported from the region was worth only $20 billion.
A 2001 study by Redefining Progress shows U.S. taxpayers subsidizing automobile use at $257 billion a year, or roughly $2,000 per taxpayer. In addition to subsidizing carbon emissions, this also means that taxpayers who do not own automobiles, including those too poor to afford them, are subsidizing those who do.
One of the bright spots about this subsidization of fossil fuels is that it provides a reservoir of tax deductions that can be diverted to climate-benign, renewable sources of energy, such as wind, solar, and geothermal energy. To subsidize the use of fossil fuels is to subsidize crop-withering heat waves, melting ice, rising seas, and more destructive storms. Perhaps it is time for the world’s taxpayers to ask if this is how they want their hard-earned money to be spent.
Plan B 2.0 Book Byte
For Immediate Release
February 1, 2007
http://www.earth-policy.org/Books/Seg/PB2ch04_ss7.htm
Lester R. Brown
Each year the world’s taxpayers provide an estimated $700 billion of subsidies for environmentally destructive activities, such as fossil fuel burning, overpumping aquifers, clearcutting forests, and overfishing. An Earth Council study, Subsidizing Unsustainable Development, observes that “there is something unbelievable about the world spending hundreds of billions of dollars annually to subsidize its own destruction.”
Iran provides a classic example of extreme subsidies when it prices oil for internal use at one tenth the world price, strongly encouraging car ownership and gas consumption. The World Bank reports that if this $3.6-billion annual subsidy were phased out, it would reduce Iran’s carbon emissions by a staggering 49 percent. It would also strengthen the economy by freeing up public revenues for investment in the country’s economic development. Iran is not alone. The Bank reports that removing energy subsidies would reduce carbon emissions in Venezuela by 26 percent, in Russia by 17 percent, in India by 14 percent, and in Indonesia by 11 percent.
Some countries are eliminating or reducing these climate-disrupting subsidies. Belgium, France, and Japan have phased out all subsidies for coal. Germany reduced its coal subsidy from $5.4 billion in 1989 to $2.8 billion in 2002, meanwhile lowering its coal use by 46 percent. It plans to phase out this support entirely by 2010. China cut its coal subsidy from $750 million in 1993 to $240 million in 1995. More recently, it has imposed a tax on high-sulfur coals.
A study by the U.K. Green Party, “Aviation’s Economic Downside,” describes the extent of subsidies currently given to the U.K. airline industry. The giveaway begins with $17 billion in tax breaks, including a total exemption from the federal tax. External or indirect costs that are not paid, such as treating illness from breathing the air polluted by planes, the costs of climate change, and so forth, add nearly $7 billion to the tab. The subsidy in the United Kingdom totals $391 per resident. This is also an inherently regressive tax policy simply because a substantial share of the U.K. population cannot afford to fly very often if at all, yet they help subsidize this high-cost mode of transportation for their more affluent compatriots.
While some leading industrial countries have been reducing subsidies to fossil fuels—notably coal, the most climate disrupting of all fuels—the United States has been increasing its support for the fossil fuel and nuclear industries. A Green Scissors report from 2002, a study supported by a coalition of environmental groups, calculated that over the preceding 10 years subsidies for the energy industry totaled $33 billion. Of that, the oil and gas industry got $26 billion, coal $3 billion, and nuclear $4 billion. At a time when there is a need to conserve oil resources, U.S. taxpayers are subsidizing their depletion.
Subsidies are not inherently bad. Many technologies and industries were born of government subsidies. Jet aircraft developed with military R&D expenditures led to modern commercial airliners. The Internet was the result of publicly funded links among computers in government laboratories and research institutes. And the combination of the federal tax deduction and a robust state tax deduction in California gave birth to the modern wind power industry.
There is an urgent need for subsidy shifting. Eliminating environmentally destructive subsidies reduces both the burden on taxpayers and the destructive activities themselves. A world facing the prospect of economically disruptive climate change, for example, can no longer justify subsidies to expand the burning of coal and oil. Shifting these subsidies to the development of climate-benign energy sources such as wind, solar, biomass, and geothermal power is the key to stabilizing the earth’s climate. Shifting subsidies from road construction to rail construction could increase mobility in many situations while reducing carbon emissions.
In a troubled world economy facing fiscal deficits at all levels of government, exploiting these subsidy shifts, as well as tax shifts, can help balance the books and save the economy’s environmental support systems. Subsidy and tax shifting promise both gains in economic efficiency and reductions in environmental destruction, a win-win situation.
At a time of mounting public concern about climate change driven by the burning of fossil fuels, the world fossil fuel industry is still being subsidized by taxpayers at more than $210 billion per year. Fossil fuel subsidies belong to another age, a time when development of the oil and coal industries was seen as a key to economic progress—not as a threat to our twenty-first century civilization. Once in place, subsidies lead to special interest lobbies that fight tooth and nail against eliminating them, even those that were not appropriate in the first place.
In the United States, oil and gas companies are now perhaps the most powerful lobbyists in Washington. Between 1990 and 2004, they amassed $181 million in campaign contributions in an effort to protect special tax deductions worth billions. In testimony before the House Ways and Means Committee in 1999, Donald Lubick, U.S. Treasury Assistant Secretary for Tax Policy, said in reference to oil and gas companies: “This is an industry that probably has a larger tax incentive relative to its size than any other industry in the country.” That such profitable investments are possible is a measure of the corruption of the U.S. political system, particularly the capacity of those with money to shape the economy to their advantage.
Subsidies permeate and distort every corner of the global economy. Germany’s coal mining subsidy was initially justified in part as a job protection measure, for example. At its peak, the government was subsidizing the industry to the tune of nearly $90,000 per year for each worker. In purely economic terms, it would have made more sense to close the mines and pay miners not to work.
Many subsidies are largely hidden from taxpayers. This is especially true of the fossil fuel industry, whose subsidies include such things as a depletion allowance for oil pumping in the United States. Even more dramatic are the routine U.S. military expenditures to protect access to Middle Eastern oil, which were calculated by analysts at the Rand Corporation before the most recent Iraq war to fall between $30 billion and $60 billion a year, while the oil imported from the region was worth only $20 billion.
A 2001 study by Redefining Progress shows U.S. taxpayers subsidizing automobile use at $257 billion a year, or roughly $2,000 per taxpayer. In addition to subsidizing carbon emissions, this also means that taxpayers who do not own automobiles, including those too poor to afford them, are subsidizing those who do.
One of the bright spots about this subsidization of fossil fuels is that it provides a reservoir of tax deductions that can be diverted to climate-benign, renewable sources of energy, such as wind, solar, and geothermal energy. To subsidize the use of fossil fuels is to subsidize crop-withering heat waves, melting ice, rising seas, and more destructive storms. Perhaps it is time for the world’s taxpayers to ask if this is how they want their hard-earned money to be spent.
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