From JoNova

By Jo Nova

Paul Homewood  came across another die-hard believer still saying “What about all the subsidies!” He reminds us of the Guardian headline hand-wringing over $7 Trillion dollars of subsidies in support of fossil fuels. The main source of this meme is the IMF, so I went to their two year old report data to create the graphs that the IMF won’t.

The IMF fossil fuel fantasy update of 2023…

The trillion dollar claims of fossil fuel subsidies amount to nothing more than IMF wet dream. Literally, 80% of the “subsidies” are what they’d like to charge oil and gas companies for things like the imaginary damage that CO2 does on simulated Earths in broken climate models. The IMF calls this “implicit subsidies”. You can I might call it a brazen fake (or worse).

The IMF has a budget of over $1 billion dollars a year, and they have 20 impenetrable super-graphs on their blog and report, but they don’t have the simple graphs like this, that I did below, showing that most of the subsidies are the “implied” imaginary sort, and that one country on Earth does all “the subsidies”. (Click to Enlarge…) Nobody mention China.

The orange “subsidies” are the total fantasies here. It really is that bad.

Fossil fuels cause car accidents, congestion and road wear don’t you know?

Unbelievably, other parts of the “80% implicit subsidy block” even include things like the cost of traffic accidents, fatalities, congestion and wear and tear on the roads.  Somehow when fossil fuels cause congestion, and we suffer a loss of productivity, that’s an implicit subsidy because the price of fuel was not efficient. (Congestion is when your car gets stuck and slows you down, and “efficiency” is when you spend an hour riding a horse, and 2 hours mucking out the stables?)

The outrageous gall of this is so much that even hard-left Vox is uncomfortable and asks if this was a bit misleading of the IMF:

“… things get weirder. For instance, about 39 percent of the “social cost” of gasoline in the IMF analysis comes from accidents, traffic fatalities, and congestion. It is true that these things are externalities. But they’re caused by automobile use, not by gasoline use per se. If we switched over to solar-powered electric cars tomorrow, we’d still have traffic accidents and congestion. It’s strange to argue that this is some sort of “subsidy” for gasoline specifically.”

It’s true: The Government could have charged you more tax:

Apparently, in the deep-climate-dimension — a Blob-academic can imagine that we’d have less congestion if we taxed fuel more and discouraged driving; therefore, a lower tax is a “subsidy”. I presume efficient pricing means people should be paying so much more that there is no congestion? I wonder if their model includes the cost of suicide and divorce when taxes are so high people spent an hour less at home each day because they have to catch buses, they give up taking the kids to soccer, and don’t eat fresh food from the farmers markets that they can’t afford to drive to?

Maybe the IMF will accidentally solve congestion because everyone will give up and move to the country to grow cabbages?

The IMF Gods-of-control actually flesh out their fantasies of what they think “efficient pricing” for coal, gas, and petrol would be, and in every country on Earth.

Lo and behold, marvel at the Super-Graph below where the efficient pricing is laid out. Be grateful girls and boys, we only pay the red-dot retail price. When the IMF rules the world the real price will be the full bar. They are just practicing for when they are One World Government and can solve congestion, productivity, car accidents and stop storms with taxes!

Imagine how many man-hours this took?

I found it so hard to believe they did include road congestion and accidents, I will just include a few passages showing the intricate, vainglorious detail:

 Estimating Average Delays from Road Congestion

Average delays are then multiplied by: (i) the relationship between marginal and average delays, which is estimated to be 400 percent (based on a review of the literature); (ii) vehicle occupancy (averaging over cars and buses); (iii) people’s value of travel time (VOT) which is assumed to be 60 percent of the nationwide average market wage in 2022;²⁵ (iv) fuel economy (to express costs per liter rather than per km); and (v) the portion of the fuel demand elasticity that comes from reduced driving (and therefore affects congestion) versus the portion that comes from improved fuel economy/shifting to EVs (that does not affect congestion).²⁶

And wear and tear on the road too:

Externalities from wear and tear on the road network imposed by high axle-weight vehicles are based on highway maintenance expenditures by country (from IRF 2022 and OECD 2023) per unit of road diesel fuel use, an assumption that half of the expenditures are attributed to vehicle use as opposed to other factors (weather and natural deterioration) and scaled by the driving portion of the fuel price elasticity.

Make these people beg directly to the voters for their salaries. It would end this nonsense in a minute…