Abstract
Hopes are high that removing fossil fuel subsidies could help to mitigate climate change by discouraging inefficient energy consumption and levelling the playing field for renewable energy. In September 2016, the G20 countries re-affirmed their 2009 commitment (at the G20 Leaders' Summit) to phase out fossil fuel subsidies and many national governments are using today's low oil prices as an opportunity to do so. In practical terms, this means abandoning policies that decrease the price of fossil fuels and electricity generated from fossil fuels to below normal market prices. However, whether the removal of subsidies, even if implemented worldwide, would have a large impact on climate change mitigation has not been systematically explored. Here we show that removing fossil fuel subsidies would have an unexpectedly small impact on global energy demand and carbon dioxide emissions and would not increase renewable energy use by 2030. Subsidy removal would reduce the carbon price necessary to stabilize greenhouse gas concentration at 550 parts per million by only 2-12 per cent under low oil prices. Removing subsidies in most regions would deliver smaller emission reductions than the Paris Agreement (2015) climate pledges and in some regions global subsidy removal may actually lead to an increase in emissions, owing to either coal replacing subsidized oil and natural gas or natural-gas use shifting from subsidizing, energy-exporting regions to non-subsidizing, importing regions. Our results show that subsidy removal would result in the largest CO 2 emission reductions in high-income oil- and gas-exporting regions, where the reductions would exceed the climate pledges of these regions and where subsidy removal would affect fewer people living below the poverty line than in lower-income regions.
Original language | English |
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Pages (from-to) | 229-233 |
Number of pages | 5 |
Journal | Nature |
Volume | 554 |
Issue number | 7691 |
DOIs | |
State | Published - Feb 7 2018 |
Externally published | Yes |
Funding
Acknowledgements The research leading to these results received funding from the European Union’s Seventh Programme FP7/2007-2013 under grant agreement number 308329 (ADVANCE). We thank the International Institute for Applied Systems Analysis, Energy Program for hosting the online database with the scenario data as well as P. Kolp, L. Groihofer and D. Garcia-Carbrera for data and database support; the International Energy Agency (in particular A. Bromhead, L. Cozzi, N. Selmet, G. Zazias and T. Shirai) for providing data and support related to their energy subsidy database; G. Luderer for contributing to the study design; and A. Cherp for commenting on the manuscript.