Happy Friday - as the week winds down here, allow me to slip in my thought that the IEA figures presented show how far the US and the world needs to further reallocate implicit and explicit subsidies towards renewable infrastructure/storage and generation and away from fossil fuels. The article suggests $7bn of mostly implicit annual support for fossil fuels, compared to separate IEA estimates of $1.7 billion (May '23) of global investment (hard dollars) in renewables. The embedded implicit assumption of social carbon costs are ever more visible in increased, climate-change related catastrophe claims and huge insurance premium increases and coverage withdrawals and exclusions, not to mention lives lost, and ultimately potential corporate financial crisis, as we all now see clearly in Hawaii.
As much as the lauded US Inflation Reduction Act provides a much needed $391 billion package of much needed subsidies which Credit Suisse estimates (Nov '22) could ultimately attract $1.7 trillion in investment over 10 years, this ultimately pales in comparison to approximately $9 trillion US fossil fuel subsidy support over the same period. Both more corporate and investor support in addition to additional explicit renewal subsidies and phase out of all fossil fuel subsidies are needed to offset and ultimately reduce the skyrocketing real negative social financial costs of climate disasters and major insurance company withdrawal/exclusions in California, Texas and more states, all of which will be also borne by governments, corporations, taxpayers in addition to the actual victims.
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