Taxpayers Give Billions in Fossil Fuel Subsidies, Lose Trillions to Related Health Costs
By Alex Kirby
Health campaigners said the energy policies of the world's richest countries are inflicting a double burden on their citizens, not only using their taxes to pay fossil fuel subsidies, but also loading huge health costs on them.
The work of the Health and Environment Alliance, HEAL, the report said that although fossil fuel combustion causes deadly air pollution and climate change, virtually all governments spend vast sums of public money—their citizens' taxes—on supporting the oil, gas and coal industry in fossil fuel energy production.
A report by HEAL said the health costs associated with fossil fuels are more than six times higher than the subsidies the industry receives in the G20 group of the globe's leading industrialized countries.
The G20 agreed in 2009 to phase out the subsidies, but HEAL said that on average, in countries belonging to the bloc, the health costs associated with fossil fuels are far greater than the subsidies: $2.76 trillion against $444 billion.
HEAL cited a 2015 report by the UK-based think tank the Overseas Development Institute (ODI), which found that "G20 country governments' support to fossil fuel production marries bad economics with potentially disastrous consequences for climate change."
HEAL's own report said the subsidies support an industry that causes premature deaths, ill-health and huge health costs worldwide, in stark contrast to the 2015 Paris agreement. It urged policymakers to end subsidies and use the public money saved to support healthy energy or health care investments instead.
Every year air pollution from mostly fossil fuel combustion cuts short the lives of an estimated 6.5 million people worldwide through respiratory tract infections, strokes, heart attacks, lung cancer and chronic lung disease. The costs to health from the resulting air pollution, climate change and environmental degradation are not carried by the industry, HEAL said, but paid by society.
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