Energy Subsidies - International

Geneva, Switzerland—29 April 2013—The World Trade Organization (WTO) and the Energy Charter organized a workshop to discuss how WTO regulation and the Energy Charter Treaty (ECT) apply to trade and investment in energy.

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.

A draft paper by the World Bank recommends raising money to fight climate change by reducing subsidies for fossil fuels, putting a price tag of US$ 25 per tonne on carbon emissions and collecting a surcharge on aviation and shipping fuels, reports Bloomberg and The Guardian.

Japan recently announced that consultations had failed to resolve its dispute with Canada over the Province of Ontario’s feed-in-tariffs for renewable energy, and that in mid-June it will be asking the WTO to establish a dispute settlement panel. This is awful news for the multilateral trade system, for which the dispute will be corrosive, seemingly pitting trade against the environment.

In the past two months, the U.S. Congress has decided to continue paying Brazilian cotton farmers US$ 147 million a year; speculation intensifies as the United States enters into consultations with China over subsidies for wind energy; and the American Soybean Association makes noises about the potential trade impacts of the European Union’s Renewable Energy Directive.

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. 

The Friends of Fossil Fuel Subsidy Reform is a group of countries committed to supporting the reform of inefficient fossil-fuel subsidies. In this joint statement, the Friends outline why they formed and what they aim to achieve.

The latest in the Global Subsidies Initiative’s series of Policy Briefs, Delivering on G-20 Commitments: The path to fossil-fuel subsidy reform, summarizes what has been done since the G-20 committed to phase out and rationalize inefficient fossil-fuel subsidies that lead to wasteful consumption, including reports to the June 2010 Toronto Summit.