The IMF Tells a Half-Truth
On May 18 the International Monetary Fund (IMF) published a report titled “How Large are Global Energy Subsidies?” The question is a bit misleading: most readers, when they see the word subsidy, probably tend to think of tax breaks or cash gifts to specific industries. The report, however, uses the term mostly to refer to environmental externalities—and not ones tied to all energy use, but ones related to fossil fuel combustion in particular.
An economic externality is an impact of a commercial activity that is not reflected in the prices of goods or services traded. There can be positive externalities: if I buy organic, responsibly farmed food, I usually expect to pay more—thus the beneficial impact of my food choice upon the environment isn’t reflected in a price that would reinforce my behavior; just the opposite is true. But far and away most externalities are negative: companies are always looking for ways to make society as a whole clean up after them so that they don’t have to pay the full costs incurred by their activities. Indeed, John Michael Greer has convincingly argued that industrial capitalism is, in effect, a negative externality-generating machine: the faster it goes and the bigger it grows, the more externalities it spews out for society as a whole to try to mitigate.
It’s certainly helpful to have an accounting of the externalities of our collective fossil fuel consumption. But the choice of the word “subsidies” over the more precise “externalities” makes a difference: governments can cancel subsidies in the forms of tax breaks and gifts, but they can’t so easily cancel fossil fuel externalities without curtailing fossil fuel consumption—and that’s a big job, if they’re to do it in a way that doesn’t entail the rapid, uncontrolled collapse of society.
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