Fossil Fuel Subsidies & Health

Nairobi―28-29th April―A two day workshop took place on ‘Reforming Fossil Fuel Subsidies for an Inclusive Green Economy,’ hosted by the United Nations Environment Programme (UNEP) and supported by the Global Subsidies Initiative (GSI), the German development agency GIZ and the International Monetary Fund (IMF).

Low fossil-fuel prices are responsible for wasteful consumption in the countries of the Gulf Cooperation Council (GCC), said Al Mazroui, Minister of Energy of the United Arab Emirates, and Al Rumhy, Minister of Oil and Gas of Oman at the Abu Dhabi International Petroleum Exhibition and Conference on November 10, 2013. Al Mazroui framed the problem as one of setting low energy prices.

BRUSSELS – 4 December – An IISD-led seminar, A Global Perspective on Biofuel Subsidies Reform in the EU, gathered policy-makers and stakeholders from business and civil society at the European Parliament, with co-hosts GLOBE EU and Gerben-Jan Gerbrandy, MEP.

The United Nations Development Program (UNDP) has released a report Energy Subsidies in the Arab World, reviewing the current state of fossil-fuel subsidies and efforts to reform them in seventeen Arab countries.

In mid-April, the Nuffield Council of Bioethics, an independent body that examines ethical issues in biology and medicine, launched the report Biofuels: ethical issues.

With many governments around the world announcing the provision of generous subsidies to cope with rising commodity prices, the relationship between fossil-fuel subsidies and oil price volatility has once again become a major concern on the international agenda. To help explain the connections between these two issues, Subsidy Watch spoke with the International Energy Agency’s (IEA) Senior Energy Analyst Amos Bromhead. 

This October, the International Budget Partnership (IBP), part of the US non-profit organisation the Center on Budget and Policy Priorities, published preliminary findings from the Ask Your Government! initiative, an ambitious research project to investigate what happens when citizens around the world ask their governments for specific budgetary information relating to key international development commitments – including the enquiry, “What was the total amount actually incurred during the past three fiscal years on subsidies for oil, gas and coal production and consumption?”

On 29 July, Bloomberg New Energy Finance, a Bloomberg-owned consultancy, put out a press release summarizing the preliminary results of a study comparing subsidies to ‘clean’ and to ‘dirty’ energy sources, namely renewable energy and fossil energy.