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  • Matters Arising
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Why fossil fuel producer subsidies matter

Nature volume 578, pages E1–E4 (2020)Cite this article

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Matters Arising to this article was published on 05 February 2020

The Original Article was published on 08 February 2018

Arising from: J. Jewell et al. Nature https://doi.org/10.1038/nature25467 (2019)

Around the globe, governments have pledged to remove support for coal, oil and gas, noting that such fossil fuel subsidies “undermine efforts to deal with climate change” by keeping greenhouse gas emissions higher than they otherwise would be1. Jewell et al.2 used results of integrated assessment models to infer that eliminating subsidies would yield “limited emission reductions…except in energy-exporting regions”, and described the emission reduction benefits as “small”. This characterization is potentially misleading, and here we use a simple, sector-specific model to show how the emission reductions from producer subsidy reform could be more material than Jewell et al. suggest3. Fossil fuel producer subsidies delay a low-carbon transition in ways both material and political, and they deserve greater attention and transparency in global modelling analyses, as well as in policy-making.

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Data availability

The authors declare that data supporting the calculations in columns B through to D of Table 1 are included as Supplementary Information. The raw data analysed by the authors for Extended Data Fig. 1 are available from Rystad Energy in their UCube database, but restrictions apply to the availability of these data, which were used under license for the referenced study, and so are not publicly available. Raw data are available from the authors upon reasonable request and with permission of Rystad Energy.

Code availability

No custom code or mathematical algorithms were used to generate results reported in this paper. The entirety of the oil market model is provided as equation (1) in the Methods.

References

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Acknowledgements

P.E. and M.L. thank A. Vogt-Schilb, S. Pye and N. Bauer for discussions about IAM models. P.E. acknowledges funding from the Schmidt Family Foundation.

Author information

Authors and Affiliations

  1. Stockholm Environment Institute US, Seattle, WA, USA

    Peter Erickson & Michael Lazarus

  2. University of Eastern Finland, Law School, Joensuu, Finland

    Harro van Asselt

  3. Earth Track, Inc, Cambridge, MA, USA

    Doug Koplow

  4. Centre for Global Political Economy, University of Sussex, Brighton, UK

    Peter Newell

  5. Department of the History of Science, Harvard University, Cambridge, MA, USA

    Naomi Oreskes & Geoffrey Supran

Authors
  1. Peter Erickson
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  2. Harro van Asselt
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  3. Doug Koplow
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  4. Michael Lazarus
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  5. Peter Newell
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  6. Naomi Oreskes
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  7. Geoffrey Supran
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Contributions

P.E. and M.L. conceptualized the research (with input from H.v.A., D.K., N.O. and G.S.). P.E. carried out the numerical modelling. P.E. wrote and revised the manuscript (with contributions from H.v.A, D.K., M.L., P.N., N.O. and G.S.).

Corresponding author

Correspondence to Peter Erickson.

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The authors declare no competing interests.

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Extended data figures and tables

Extended Data Fig. 1 Cost curve of world oil production in 2030.

The cumulative supply of oil in 2030 is shown for increasing oil price. Most blocks (64 of 80) in this cost curve represent a combination of a particular stage of development (one of four) in eight major world regions (the continents plus the Middle East and Russia minus Antarctica), whether onshore or offshore. Further (16) blocks represent the USA or Canada, since they are major new sources of oil (about 41% and 7% of all regions that are not yet producing oil). The figure is adapted from figure 1 in ref. 20 and based on data from Rystad Energy (see ‘Data availability’ section).

Supplementary information

Supplementary Methods

Supplementary Data

This file contains source data for Table 1.

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Erickson, P., van Asselt, H., Koplow, D. et al. Why fossil fuel producer subsidies matter. Nature 578, E1–E4 (2020). https://doi.org/10.1038/s41586-019-1920-x

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