How to save $300 billion with Fossil-Fuel Subsidies

Fossil-fuel subsidies have united economists and environmentalists as they are struggling to create universal and uniform measures about these subsidies’ efficiency. They report only superficially and make up their own standards to measure themselves by. Furthermore none of these countries are coming out with a subsidy-cutting policy. In comparison to the countries themselves the World Energy Outlook of the International Energy Agency (IEA), which collects and stores annual data and analysis, offers an objective scale of subsidies for fossil-fuel consumers.

According to the report for 2010, IEA puts the global total subsidies at $312 billion a year. It estimates a worldwide 5% energy demand reduction that would follow on an elimination of these subsidies, making it equal to the current energy consumption of Japan, Korea and New Zealand combined. Efforts that decrease energy demand and usage in order to build a safer, cleaner, and more sustainable world are also done on the small scale by the company Energy Education Inc. with programs that target a change in human energy consumption.