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1 Scott A. Hodge, IEA Study Ranks Nations' Subsidies to Fossil Fuel Consumption 1 (2010)

handle is hein.taxfoundation/ffcfcxz0001 and id is 1 raw text is: November22, 20100 N o . 2 5 2........ .. i. lEA Study Ranks Nations' Subsidies to Fossil Fuel Consumption US. Governments Offer Little Support to Energy Firms By Scott Hodge In advance of the G-20 meeting in Seoul, the International Energy Agency (lEA) released its annual World Energy Outlook, a 738-page analysis of the global energy market. The report discusses the market for various types of energy and summarizes the energy policies of the world's governments, devoting two chapters to raising the alarm about government subsidies for fossil fuel usage. Just five months earlier the IEA had published in conjunction with OPEC, the OECD and the World Bank a stand-alone study of governmental subsidies to energy in advance of the G-20 meeting in Toronto. That joint report found that no systematic effort has been undertaken within the last decade to estimate subsidies to fossil-fuel production over a wide range of countries.2 In both reports, the IEA expresses its opposition to energy subsidies if they encourage the production or consumption of fossil fuels, but the United States does not come in for criticism because most nations subsidize fossil fuels far more than the U.S. does. Yet the Obama Administration has devoted considerable effort in policy proposals and public relations to eliminate not only the few subsidies that fossil fuel providers currently receive, but to withhold from them the ordinary tax treatment of business expenditures that many corporate taxpayers benefit from. Not that the federal government offers no energy subsidies, but the vast majority is funneled to the producers and consumers of wind, solar and other forms of non-fossil-fuel energy. How and Why Governments Subsidize Energy Because tax policy is one way governments subsidize or punish energy production and consumption, here we consider how U.S. tax policy stacks up versus the rest of the world in this increasingly important area. 'International Energy Agency, World Energy Outlook, November 2010. 2 International Energy Agency, Organization of Petroleum Exporting Countries, the Organization for Economic Cooefi romNaDeopmthenadteraWovrBnkenalysoff hes opeegofsbEneySusidieaSugstionsoitfor Cooperation and Development, and the World Bank, Analysis of the Scope of Energy Subsidies and Suggestions for the G-20 Initiative, June 16, 2010, http://www.worldenergyoutlook.org/docs/G20_Subsidy Joint Report.pdf. Scott Hodge is the president of the Tax Foundation.

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