Irish farmers continue to see annual payments penalised for maintaining biodiversity hotspots despite concerns raised by the State over the climate and biodiversity crises.
Greta Thunberg’s accusation that world leaders are guilty of ‘blah, blah, blah’ in the face of the escalating climate crisis is ‘spot on’, according to a trio of new reports released today, which warn the opportunity provided by the coronavirus crisis to introduce sweeping fossil fuel subsidy reform and ambitious green stimulus packages is being squandered.
Moving the economy to net zero – emitting less carbon dioxide than it consumes – will be messy and expensive unless the government has a radical rethink about how to simplify its approach to taxing greenhouse gas production.
The fossil fuel industry benefits from subsidies of $11m every minute, according to analysis by the International Monetary Fund. The IMF found the production and burning of coal, oil and gas was subsidised by $5.9tn in 2020, with not a single country pricing all its fuels sufficiently to reflect their full supply and environmental costs.
The federal government is facing a revolt from states and territories over its plan to allow subsidies for coal and gas-fired power stations as part of reforms to shore up reliability of the electricity grid.
There’s one thing holding public power back as the industry strives to meet the ambitious clean energy goals — the federal tax code. As it currently stands, federal tax policy puts public power communities at a disadvantage by having them pay more for the same clean energy outcomes as customers in other market.
Almost 90% of the $540bn in global subsidies given to farmers every year are “harmful”, a startling UN report has found. This agricultural support damages people’s health, fuels the climate crisis, destroys nature and drives inequality by excluding smallholder farmers, many of whom are women, according to the UN agencies.
The European Parliament’s agriculture committee approved a deal to overhaul the European Union’s huge farming subsidies, including new measures aimed at making agriculture greener.
Almost half a trillion dollars of support a year harms people’s health, the climate and drives inequality.
Taxpayer-funded farm subsidies have long been skewed in favor of the richest farmers and landowners. But under the Trump administration, even more money went to the largest and wealthiest farms, further shortchanging smaller, struggling family farms.
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