Major nations seem to be reducing fossil fuel subsidies but still have “ample scope” for deeper cuts in recent support of up to $200 billion a year, the Organisation for Economic Cooperation and Development (OECD) said on Monday. <\/p>\n
Reductions in damaging subsidies for oil, coal and natural gas would reduce air pollution, save cash and help a shift to greener energies before a November 30-December 11 UN summit in Paris on limiting climate change, it said. <\/p>\n
The OECD, updating an inventory of subsidies, estimated the annual value for 2010-14 at between $160 billion and $200 billion, mostly for petroleum products, in the 34 OECD nations and China, India, Brazil, Russia, Indonesia and South Africa. <\/p>\n
“Support now seems to follow a downward trend after having peaked twice in 2008 and 2011-12,” the OECD said, without giving exact annual figures. The Group of 20 agreed as long ago as 2009 to phase out inefficient subsidies for fossil fuels. <\/p>\n
Among recent reforms, the OECD pointed to cuts in support by India and Mexico for diesel and gasoline. A fall in oil prices has made it easier to phase out support. <\/p>\n
“There is clearly ample scope to save scarce budgetary resources and improve the environment in both advanced and emerging economies” with deeper cuts, OECD Secretary-General Angel Gurria said in a statement. <\/p>\n
The OECD said its numbers do not cover all factors causing artificially lower prices in emerging nations. And not all the subsidies were “unambiguously inefficient”. <\/p>\n
The OECD said its data is not directly comparable with that of the International Energy Agency, which reckons fossil-fuel consumption subsidies worldwide amounted to $548 billion in 2013. <\/p>\n
The OECD has been trying for more than a year to reach agreement on phasing out a form of coal subsidy that helps rich nations export technology for coal generation. Talks in Paris last week again failed to get a deal. <\/p>\n
The negotiations will resume on November 16, EU diplomats said. <\/p>\n
Separately, environmental group Greenpeace said on Monday that the world could shift to 100 per cent renewable energy by 2050. <\/p>\n
Investments of $1 trillion a year would be offset by savings of $1.07 trillion, partly because wind and solar power are free of fuel costs once set up, unlike fossil fuels, it said in a report.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"
Major nations seem to be reducing fossil fuel subsidies but still have “ample scope” for deeper cuts in recent support of up to $200 billion a year, the Organisation for Economic Cooperation and Development (OECD) said on Monday. Reductions in damaging subsidies for oil, coal and natural gas would reduce air pollution, save cash and help a shift to greener energies before a November 30-December 11 UN summit in Paris on limiting climate change, it said. The OECD, updating an inventory of subsidies, estimated the annual value for 2010-14 at between $160 billion and $200 billion, mostly for petroleum products, […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_acf_changed":false,"footnotes":""},"categories":[133],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-33977","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-oil-gas"],"acf":[],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/infralive.com\/web\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/33977","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/infralive.com\/web\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/infralive.com\/web\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/infralive.com\/web\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/infralive.com\/web\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=33977"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/infralive.com\/web\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/33977\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/infralive.com\/web\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=33977"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/infralive.com\/web\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=33977"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/infralive.com\/web\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=33977"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}