While Republicans have been demanding to know why Attorney General Merrick Garland has not devoted his entire career to seeing that Hunter Biden is locked up, a few other things have been going on.
Namely, the United Nations General Assembly meeting in New York and huge climate protests around the world after a summer of record-breaking climate calamity.
Even though there are good things happening on the climate front, one of the biggest travesties is that nations are still subsidizing the fossil fuel industry — to the tune of $7 trillion (yes, trillion) to $12 trillion in just one year, depending on who is crunching the numbers.
We are literally paying to have ourselves killed.
Some of these subsidies are known as “explicit subsidies,” basically, paying to keep prices low. These come in the form of tax breaks and direct payments designed to keep producers and consumers happy.
“Implicit subsidies” make up a much greater share of the multi-trillion-dollar pie. These are the real costs of burning fossil fuels that are not reflected in pricing.
In other words, the price of a gallon of gas does not factor in the cost of rising sea levels and kids dying from air pollution.
No matter how you slice it, we are subsidizing fossil fuels to the tune of trillions of dollars every year.
The International Monetary Fund calculates that getting rid of subsidies would cut carbon emissions by 34%.
Not bad!
Now all we have to do is stop paying the industry that is trying to kill us.
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