The fake environmentalism of the G20:in 2022 record subsidies for fossil fuels

It is often believed that energy from petroleum sources is much cheaper than renewable sources:a belief that forgets a non-negligible detail, that of the enormous public subsidies that extractive activities and the multinationals that lead them receive from states in the form of direct or indirect financing.This river of money continues to flow, and indeed, in 2022 - despite the much vaunted green transition - it set a new record.In fact, in the past year, only the G20 countries spent 1.4 trillion dollars to finance fossil fuels.The enormous figure was estimated by a relationship of the International Institute for Sustainable Development (IISD), adding direct subsidies, investments by state-owned enterprises and loans by public financial institutions.According to the data collected, the twenty largest economies in the world have far exceeded the amount spent on fossil fuels in previous years, spending more than double compared to 2019.

At the time, moreover, the "energy price crisis" - driven by sanctions on Russia and stock market speculation – had not yet manifested itself, and with it the renewed rush of Western countries to relaunch fossil fuel activity to reduce dependence on Moscow's gas.A third of the funding allocated by the States to reduce the prices of supplies, in fact, was not allocated to citizens to reduce the high bills, but directly paid into the tastes of the extractive companies to “stimulate investments in the production of new fossil fuels”.The logical consequence, then, is that in terms of costs, clean energy continues to be less competitive, which - according to the authors of the report - produces a drastic reduction in the "chance of achieving the climate objectives set by the Paris Agreement".The same one Paris Agreement that in 2015 the G20 countries they ratified, committing to making “financial flows consistent with a path towards low greenhouse gas emissions and development resilient to climate change”.

A useful fact to shed light on thefaçade environmentalism of the States, who in recent years have taken on the most varied commitments green and imposed frequent limitations on citizens (from the ban on using old cars which especially affects the poorest, to the ban on using wood stoves) under the pretext of fighting polluting emissions.Just cast your mind back to 2009, when G20 governments promised to phase out “inefficient fossil fuel subsidies”:a commitment that world leaders chose to pursue further in 2021, on the occasion of COP26. Promises upon promises which, according to the facts, have not yet been kept by the G20, which apparently, rather than stemming fossil fuel activities, is significantly increasing them.

The IISD report is not the first report to focus on inconsistent financial support for oil activities.A relationship published last February by the International Energy Agency (IEA), for example, underlined how the amount of subsidies intended for fossil fuels in 2022 represented a “worrying sign for energy transitions”, while in a relationship last June the World Bank certified that “every year countries spend six times more to subsidize the consumption of fossil fuels than they should under the commitments made under the Paris Agreement”.

[by Raffaele De Luca]