Quantifying the Subsidies Given Renewables and Fossil Fuels
I’m in the process of writing my next book — this one on the practical realities of clean energy — which has brought me to a study of the nature of the playing field on which renewables competes with fossil fuels. This, of course, is critical. No one can expect capital formation for clean energy as long as the alternative is made artificially inexpensive with government subsidies that have been in place since the early 20th Century, and which, many people believe, are a permanent fixture in our national budget.
Of terrific help in helping me understand this is the Research and Policy division of the Environmental Law Institute, a non-profit in Washington DC, which endeavors to unravel the twists to get at the full truth of the relationship between government and energy.
I hope readers will check out a few of their papers, in which they attempt to quantify the subsidies for fossil fuels. Here’s one called Estimating U.S. Government Subsidies to Energy Sources: 2002-2008.
