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The program will display the results. that are incurred by people other than the person responsible for them and in the case of fossil fuels those externalities are huge the air pollution water pollution and climate change that are associated with fossil fuels are all costs that are paid by people other than the ones who use the fossil fuels and that’s why one of the best ways to reduce our reliance on fossil fuels is to make sure that their true cost to society is reflected in their price
Climate scientists agree that we need to seriously reduce our greenhouse gas emissions if we’re going to avoid the worst impacts of climate change and one of the best ways to do that is to ditch fossil fuels as our main source of energy. The good news is that many countries have already set targets to become carbon neutral by 2050, and much of the technology to do that already exists. To use an American football analogy, we have the ball now, we just have to run it to the end zone.
The difficulty is that fossil fuels are so embedded in our lives that the path to a greener future is full of economic, political, and social challenges, like tons of opposing players trying to stop us in our tracks. So if we want to make it through, we’re going to have to strap on our helmets and tackle those obstacles head on.
Fossil fuels are a huge part of our lives for three main reasons. One, they pack a lot of energy into a small space. For instance, a liter of gasoline contains about as much energy as three to four sticks of dynamite, and unlike a handful of dynamite, the energy in gasoline can be released gradually rather than all at once in a big explosion. That makes it an ideal fuel source for engines, generators, power plants, and equipment that needs to run consistently.
The second reason fossil fuels are everywhere is that they’re versatile. Sure, they can be used to heat your school, keep the lights on, or power a cargo ship, but they can also be used in less obvious ways, like to make fertilizer, to provide heat, to make cement and steel, or even to make synthetic fabrics and plastic. As a society, we’ve really taken that versatility and run with it, incorporating fossil fuels into virtually every industry.
Ultimately, though, the thing that makes fossil fuels so useful, which is the third uniting factor here, is that they are cheap. Fossil fuels are cheap partly because they’ve been widely available in abundance underground and because we’ve built a lot of infrastructure around them, but they’re also cheap because for the last two centuries, governments have put a huge amount of effort and action into making them cheap. Often, that takes the form of subsidies, which are kind of like coupons.
Direct subsidies are incentives offered to fossil fuel producers and consumers to drive the prices down. At the production end, this can take the form of tax breaks offered to oil companies and cheaper and more flexible leases for companies that want to mine or drill on federal lands. On the consumption side of things, some governments find ways to cut prices for consumers like you and me. For example, until 2015, the United Arab Emirates effectively made a nationwide discount on gas, so when their citizens fueled up, their gas was cheaper than market value.
In a time when it’s in our best interests to move away from fossil fuels, it may be surprising that these subsidies are still alive and well across the world, but not too surprising. We all have a hard time saying no to a discount, and when those discounts involve the raw materials that drive the economy and, for now, much of our daily lives, saying no is even harder than turning down a buy one get one free coupon on science t-shirts.
Between 2017 and 2019, the International Energy Agency estimated that together, the countries that hold most of the fossil fuel supplies gave more than 550 billion dollars of direct subsidies each year. But direct subsidies aren’t the only way that the price of fossil fuels is kept low.
Imagine you spent a hundred dollars on your bike, but whenever you rode it, you smashed through your neighbor’s gardens, causing them to have to buy new plants and spend money and time printing “Don’t Bike in My Garden” signs. If you add up all the money your neighbors had to spend, suddenly your bike is costing a lot more than a hundred dollars; it’s just not costing you that extra money. This is what is called a negative externality. It describes costs that are incurred by people other than the person responsible for them, and in the case of fossil fuels, those externalities are huge. The air pollution, water pollution, and climate change that are associated with fossil fuels are all costs that are paid by people other than the ones who use the fossil fuels, and that’s why one of the best ways to reduce our reliance on fossil fuels is to make sure that their true cost to society is reflected in their price.