Psst, Trudeau: IMF Now Pegs Our Fossil Fuel Subsidies at $46 Billion
Fastest way to transition Canada to a green economy? Quit the giveaways.
According to IMF economists, Canadian carbon-based fuels should be taxed an additional $17.2 billion annually to compensate for climate change. Oil photo via Shutterstock.
Globally, this figure balloons to US$5.3 trillion or 6.5 per cent of the world’s GDP. To put that enormous sum in perspective, the global giveaway to the energy sector amounts to 40 timesmore money than is contributed in aid to the world’s poorest people.
To be clear, the IMF is including all untaxed externalized costs of energy use under their definition of subsidies. The figures flagged for Canada still include $1.4 billion in direct “pre-tax” subsidies — the kind of direct public giveaways that Trudeau campaigned to eliminate. The remaining $44.6 billion is in the form of externalized costs to society from dirty and dangerous fossil fuels — things like air pollution, traffic congestion and climate change.
I realize that the folks at the Fraser Institute might get rankled by such a broad definition of subsidies by those pinkos at the IMF, and in fact they already have. But as they say in business, there’s no free lunch, so why should all taxpayers have to pick up the tab for very real costs resulting from our ongoing addiction to fossil fuels?
Let’s get down to brass tacks. How much money is being left on the table in favour of the fossil fuel sector?
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