| | | It does because people who want to claim huge subsidies for fossil fuels add together a bunch of things that aren't subsidies.
In this case generous estimates of externalities. In other cases I've seen tax deductions based off standard accounting rules and available to every type of business called subsidies for the oil industry.
If you define subsidies broadly to include targeted tax breaks then fossil fuels are subsided. Just not as much (at least not as much in the US and Europe and Japan) as alternatives, and far less then alternatives on a subsidy per unit of energy basis.
If you define subsidizes narrowly, direct subsidies, then fossil fuels are still subsidized to a lesser extent in some places, but the subsidies aren't very significant compared to the size of the market in fossil fuels.
Oil (a narrower topic then fossil fuels in general) receives a net negative subsidy, a penalty from the government, in the US, most of Europe, Japan, South Korea, and a number of other countries. It gets subsidized in some countries, mostly less developed oil exporters, but the main oil consumers mostly penalize it, so the net subsidy is negative. |
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