This fossil-fuels-more-subsidised-than-renewables meme has been spread, inter alia, by the Guardian's ludicrous Damian Carrington; by Labour MP Barry "Dork Brain" Gardiner (Vice President of the sinister GLOBE international); by green pressure groups; by the Overseas Development Institute; and by the IMF which, impressively, has put global energy subsidies at $1.9 trillion – the majority of these, apparently, for fossil fuels…
Now the bit that interests me is that weasel phrase "There is no single internationally agreed definition of what constitutes energy subsidy".
Do you see what they just did there? Let me explain.
Not so long ago – and indeed for the first five hundred and fifty odd years of its recorded usage – a subsidy was something quite clearly understood by everyone to mean a cash incentive.
Here, for example, is the online Merriam-Webster definition:
Money that is paid usually by a government to keep the price of a product or service low or to help a business or organization to continue to function.
Here is the one from my Chambers dictionary:
Aid in the form of money; a grant of public money in aid of some enterprise, industry etc; or to support or keep down the price of a commodity, or from one state to another.
This is certainly the sense in which I have always understood the word. I would suspect the same is true for most of you. So I would argue that there is something slippery and disingenuous about that claim above that there is no "internationally agreed definition of what constitutes energy subsidy
." Yes there is. Everyone – every normal, reasonably well-educated, English-speaking person, at any rate – would know instantly what constitutes "subsidy", regardless of whether or not the word "energy" is put in front of it. It means a cash incentive.
What it definitely doesn't mean is a tax reduction. Why doesn't it mean this? Well, let's examine the logic for a moment. Suppose I were to mug you in the street and steal, say, £100 from you. But then, in a fit of generosity, I decided to hand you back a tenner so you could get a cab home. Could that tenner be reasonably described as a "gift" or a "donation"? Well, yes, I suppose at an enormous stretch, it could just about. "Dono" means "I give" in Latin, so, yes, when I give you back that "tenner" it could be construed as a gift or a donation.
But only by someone lacking in any kind of moral responsibility, or intellectual consistency, or understanding of sense, context and nuance. No sensitive user of the English language would ever employ the word "gift" or "donation" in such a perverted way.
The same applies to this new usage of "subsidy" – as endorsed above by the Environmental Audit Committee, by the Guardian's Damian Carrington, by the Sunday Times's Jonathan Leake, by Barry "Dork Brain" Gardiner, by the Overseas Development Institute, by Bloomberg New Energy, by the IMF and so on. Every one of these people and institutions is using it in the novel sense "being granted a tax reduction by the state." So, for example, if you are a fracking company which would normally be taxed at say 20 per cent, but the government decides to kick start your industry by reducing the tax rate to, say, 15 per cent you are – according to this new tortured definition of the word – receiving a subsidy. But how can this be? If the government takes less of your money in tax it is not actually giving you that money, any more than I was giving that tenner a moment ago just after I mugged you.
