Fossil Fuel Subsidies & Climate Change

Norman Myers, an environmental scientist, is the author of the book Perverse Subsidies: Tax $s Undercutting our Economies and Environments Alike. He is currently completing a new book called How Institutions Block Our Road to Sustainability. He also serves as a member of the High-Level Advisory Group of the Global Subsidies Initiative. The GSI reached Mr. Myers at his home in Oxford, England.

A British non-profit organization has made a series of broad recommendations for how the EU budget could be better directed towards addressing climate change. Investing in our future: a European budget for climate security, published by Green Alliance, calls on Europe to take the lead in shaping the response to climate change, and to take a closer look at the linkages between environmental and economic policy.

In a recent article ("A New Agenda for Global Warming"), Joseph Stiglitz, Nobel laureate in economics and former Chief Economist at the World Bank, suggests that Japan, Europe, and the other signatories of Kyoto should immediately bring a WTO subsidy case against the United States for not ratifying the Kyoto Convention and for not taxing adequately CO2 emissions by US firms.