'Dumbest Policy in the World': Report Details How Canada's Massive Fossil Fuel Subsidies Undermine Climate Action
“What’s the dumbest policy in the world? Public cash for oil and gas!”
That’s according to Patrick DeRochie, Climate & Energy program manager for the Canadian group Environmental Defence, who wrote Monday about a new report that aims to shed light on the Canadian government’s hundreds of millions dollars in subsidies to the fossil fuel industry.
“Actually, the final figure is likely much higher, but a lack of transparency from the federal government makes many subsidies to climate polluters difficult to quantify,” DeRochie added, calling on the Canadian government to disclose just how much it’s doling out to polluters.
Public Cash for Oil and Gas (pdf), produced by the #StopFundingFossils coalition—which includes the International Institute for Sustainable Development (IISD), Environmental Defence, Climate Action Network, Équiterre, and Oil Change International—emphasizes that Canada’s “handouts” of taxpayer money to oil and gas producers “undermine” actions that aim to address the human-caused global climate criss.
Pointing to “strong evidence that the federal government’s plan to meet Canada’s 2030 climate target is ‘highly inefficient’ (Climate Action Tracker, 2018), necessitating greater efforts in the oil and gas sector,” the report explains:
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