{"id":8317,"date":"2015-05-21T06:20:16","date_gmt":"2015-05-21T11:20:16","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/olduvai.ca\/?p=8317"},"modified":"2015-05-21T06:20:16","modified_gmt":"2015-05-21T11:20:16","slug":"the-imf-tells-a-half-truth","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/olduvai.ca\/?p=8317","title":{"rendered":"The IMF Tells a Half-Truth"},"content":{"rendered":"<h3><a href=\"http:\/\/www.postcarbon.org\/the-imf-tells-a-half-truth\/\" target=\"_blank\">The IMF Tells a Half-Truth<\/a><\/h3>\n<p>On May 18 the International Monetary Fund (IMF) published a report titled \u201c<a href=\"http:\/\/www.imf.org\/external\/pubs\/cat\/longres.aspx?sk=42940.0\">How Large are Global Energy Subsidies?<\/a>\u201d The question is a bit misleading: most readers, when they see the word\u00a0<i>subsidy,<\/i>\u00a0probably tend to think of tax breaks or cash gifts to specific industries. The report, however, uses the term mostly to refer to environmental externalities\u2014and not ones tied to all energy use, but ones related to fossil fuel combustion in particular.<\/p>\n<p>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\u2014thus the beneficial impact of my food choice upon the environment isn\u2019t 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\u2019t have to pay the full costs incurred by their activities. Indeed, John Michael Greer has convincingly argued that industrial\u00a0<a href=\"http:\/\/thearchdruidreport.blogspot.com\/2015\/02\/the-externality-trap-or-how-progress.html\">capitalism is, in effect, a negative externality-generating machine<\/a>: the faster it goes and the bigger it grows, the more externalities it spews out for society as a whole to try to mitigate.<\/p>\n<p>It\u2019s certainly helpful to have an accounting of the externalities of our collective fossil fuel consumption. But the choice of the word \u201csubsidies\u201d over the more precise \u201cexternalities\u201d makes a difference: governments can cancel subsidies in the forms of tax breaks and gifts, but they can\u2019t so easily cancel fossil fuel externalities without curtailing fossil fuel consumption\u2014and that\u2019s a big job, if they\u2019re to do it in a way that doesn\u2019t entail the rapid, uncontrolled collapse of society.<\/p>\n<p>&nbsp;<\/p>\n<p>&#8230;click on the above link to read the rest of the article&#8230;<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>The IMF Tells a Half-Truth On May 18 the International Monetary Fund (IMF) published a report titled \u201cHow Large are Global Energy Subsidies?\u201d The question is a bit misleading: most readers, when they see the word\u00a0subsidy,\u00a0probably tend to think of tax breaks or cash gifts to specific industries. The report, however, uses the term mostly [&hellip;]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_monsterinsights_skip_tracking":false,"_monsterinsights_sitenote_active":false,"_monsterinsights_sitenote_note":"","_monsterinsights_sitenote_category":0,"footnotes":""},"categories":[3],"tags":[5547,5548,1015,5546,418,434,1081],"class_list":["post-8317","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-energy-2","tag-energy-subsidies","tag-environmental-externalities","tag-fossil-fuel","tag-half-truth","tag-imf","tag-international-monetary-fund","tag-richard-heinberg"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/olduvai.ca\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/8317","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/olduvai.ca\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/olduvai.ca\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/olduvai.ca\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/olduvai.ca\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=8317"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"https:\/\/olduvai.ca\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/8317\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":8318,"href":"https:\/\/olduvai.ca\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/8317\/revisions\/8318"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/olduvai.ca\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=8317"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/olduvai.ca\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=8317"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/olduvai.ca\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=8317"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}