Fossil fuel subsidies

Two brief excerpts from the International Energy Agency's publication, World Energy Outlook 2016, highlight what happens when there's no guiding strategic vision for our planet's future:

The value of fossil-fuel consumption subsidies dropped in 2015 to $325 billion, from almost $500 billion the previous year. ... Subsidies to renewables are around $150 billion today. World Energy Outlook 2016, Executive Summary; link to pdf here

The drop owes something to what the publication calls a 'subsidy reform process' but also to lower fossil-fuel prices. As well as these billions, there are, of course, subsidies for the exploration, development and production of fossil fuels. These are difficult to assess because of the “lack of transparency in government and company accounts, and limited information on off-budget subsidies to producers" source. It's easy to see how these subsidies arose, and why they persist. What is more difficult to discern is how our policymaking systems can do anything to address them. Large corporations have immense political power, partly funded by the very subsidies whose withdrawal they can effectively resist. The multitude of smaller interests, those of ordinary people and the environment, have little weight in our policymaking system.

There's nothing new in such an analysis, but what I can offer is a means by which we can aggregate and represent the interests of the vast majority of human beings - now and in the future - who don't benefit from energy subsidies and who suffer from the environmental depredations they cause. We could issue Social Policy Bonds that target for improvement the health of humans, plants and animals. Backed by national governments, the bonds would channel the market's incentives and efficiencies into improving the environmental well-being of the entire planet. Large corporations could still make money doing what they do now, but they'd find it less profitable. They might instead re-focus their resources into more environmentally beneficial areas. The way the bonds work means that bondholders would pick the lowest-hanging fruit first. In other words, they would maximise the environmental improvement per dollar spent.

But perhaps most important of all, Social Policy Bonds would clarify what we, as a species, wish to see. The current arrangement, the one that subordinates mankind and the planet to the narrow, short-term interests of large corporations, came about without consulting the rest of us. It thrives because the policymaking process is opaque to ordinary people, concentrating as it does on legalisms, institutional structures and, as we see with energy subsidies, obscure funding arrangements. A Social Policy Bond regime would change that. Because the bonds' starting point would be social and environmental outcomes, the public could participate in the policymaking process. So, if we wanted to donate billions of our taxes to large energy corporations we could still do so under a bond regime. I doubt that we'd choose to do that, but if we did we'd be doing so with our eyes open.

For more about environmental applications of the Social Policy Bond principle see here.