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wealth versus climate change

Most of the World Is Still Subsidising Oil

Climate change, LOL

It's axiomatic that if you really want to keep people from buying something you just tax the shit out of it. Cigarettes would be one example where an acutely dangerous product underlying an vast public health emergency was progressively made expensive enough to make its consumption financially painful if not prohibitive.

Climate change is an emergency, too, albeit one that's felt rather more collectively. It's often remarked that the  onlyway we're really going to get control over it is through taxation, essentially. Carbon taxes. Make climate change personally expensive.

One example of this is directly taxing gasoline, something that's common across much of the Western world, including the United States. In many nations, gas taxes have been rising, but, according to a paper published today in  Nature Energy, many other governments subsidize gasoline consumption instead. In fact, the gas tax global mean fell 13.3 percent between 2003 and 2015 as gas consumption has shifted toward countries that maintain gasoline subsidies or that have very low taxes.

The current paper, which comes courtesy of political scientist Michael Ross and colleagues at the University of California Los Angeles, is concerned with a fundamental problem that extends beyond gas taxes themselves. This is the inherent murkiness of assessing and verifying energy taxes, generally.

Read the rest at Motherboard.