The use of fossil fuels is being subsidised worldwide to the tune of billions of euros. Huge government support is encouraging carbon emissions and therefore climate change. The Netherlands alone pays out more than seven billion euros in subsidies each year. At the same time, world leaders in Copenhagen are complaining about global warming.
 
Fossil fuel subsidies are generally introduced with the best intentions. In developing countries, they are introduced to make energy, such as petrol and heating fuel, affordable for ordinary people.

In rich countries, it's mainly the manufacturers that benefit from the subsidies; industry pays much less for its energy than consumers do. However, cheap fossil fuels mean industry is not encouraged to find cleaner and cheaper production methods.

Engineer Cees van Beers of Delft Technical University has researched fossil fuel subsidies:

"On a worldwide scale – the figures date from a couple of years back, but things are not much different now – we are talking about around 1065 billion dollars. That is a 1 with 12 zeros!"  
 
Limit global warming
International research confirms Mr Van Beers’ data. The International Institute for Sustainable Development in Canada says the money that disappears into subsidising fossil fuels now is equivalent to the amount neccesary to limit global warming to 2 degrees centigrade.
 
And the well-known American climate scientist Jim Hansen points out that large energy producers are not only excused from paying for the damage they do to the environment and the climate, they are even paid to do it through subsidies.
 
The situation in the Netherlands is hardly better. Here there are 41 so-called off-budget schemes to stimulate the use of fossil fuels. This amounts to seven-and-a-half billion euros every year.
 
Red diesel
Often they are old schemes which appeared useful and even beneficial to society at one point. Mr Van Beers points out that 'red diesel', used by farmers in their tractors and farming machines, "are subject to less taxes than the diesel used in cars and lorries. It is actually a farming subsidy, but in effect it subsidises fossil fuel."
 
Sensitive issue
These kinds of schemes are popular, because they save consumers and producers a lot of money. So it is difficult to get political change; environmental spokespeople are sensitive to how voters will react.

However opposition MP Boris van den Ham of the Democrat D66 party does have something to say on the issue:
 
"The Netherlands could do a lot more within Europe to be a leader in the area of clean energy in my opinion. There are things we do, but I think it is too little. Putting an end to this seven-and-a-half billion euro subsidy would be a good start."
 
And Socialist Party MP Paul Jansen, who is also in the opposition, says it is ridiculous that "handfuls of money disappear into businesses, which in actual fact represent old technology”.
 
Nonsense
Indeed, stimulating "clean" and "dirty" energy at the same time is a nonsense, says Cees van Beers. "If there were no subsidies for fossil fuels, the Netherlands would have easily have met its 30 percent CO2 reduction in the Kyoto treaty."

Photo: Francesco Cavallari Photography at Flickr