{"id":6768,"date":"2010-04-14T12:08:40","date_gmt":"2010-04-14T18:08:40","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/blog.sustainablog.org\/?p=6768"},"modified":"2010-04-14T12:08:40","modified_gmt":"2010-04-14T18:08:40","slug":"environmental-impact-of-government-subsidies","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/sustainablog.org\/articles\/environmental-impact-of-government-subsidies\/","title":{"rendered":"Taxpayer Dollars Subsidizing Destruction"},"content":{"rendered":"
<\/a><\/p>\n By Lester R. Brown<\/strong><\/p>\n One way to correct market failures is tax shifting<\/a>\u2014raising taxes on activities that harm the environment so that their prices begin to reflect their true cost and offsetting this with a reduction in income taxes. A complementary way to achieve this goal is subsidy shifting. Each year the world\u2019s taxpayers provide at least $700 billion in subsidies for environmentally destructive activities, such as fossil fuel burning, overpumping aquifers, clear-cutting forests, and overfishing. As the Earth Council study Subsidizing Unsustainable Development<\/a><\/em> observes, \u201cThere\u2019s something unbelievable about the world spending hundreds of billions of dollars annually to subsidize its own destruction.\u201d The perverse nature of harmful subsidies is especially apparent in the case of oceanic fisheries. Partly as a result of these subsidies, there are now so many fishing trawlers that their catch potential is nearly double the sustainable fish catch. Three fourths of ocean fisheries are now being fished at or beyond capacity or are recovering from overexploitation. If we continue with business as usual, many of these fisheries will collapse. The cod fishery off the coast of Newfoundland in Canada is a prime example of what can happen. Long one of the world\u2019s most productive fisheries, it collapsed in the early 1990s and may never recover.<\/p>\n In the end, governments need to eliminate fishery subsidies. Shifting these subsidies, which encourage destructive overfishing, to the creation of marine parks to regenerate fisheries would be a giant step in restoring oceanic fisheries. A U.K. team of scientists led by Dr. Andrew Balmford of the Conservation Science Group at Cambridge University has analyzed the costs of operating marine reserves on a large scale based on data from 83 relatively small, well-managed reserves. They concluded that managing a network of marine reserves governing 30 percent of the oceans would cost only $12\u201314 billion\u2014much less than the $22 billion in harmful subsidies that governments dole out today to fishers. Balmford said, \u201cOur study suggests that we could afford to conserve the seas and their resources in perpetuity, and for less than we are now spending on subsidies to exploit them unsustainably.\u201d<\/p>\n Falling water tables pose another problem that could be partly addressed through subsidy shifting. The drilling of millions of irrigation wells over the last half century has pushed water withdrawals beyond recharge rates, in effect leading to groundwater mining. The failure of governments to limit pumping to the sustainable yield of aquifers means that water tables are now falling in countries that contain more than half the world\u2019s people, including the big three grain producers\u2014China, India, and the United States.<\/p>\n \n
\n<\/p>\nHarmful government subsidies: fisheries<\/h2>\n
Harmful government subsidies: water<\/h2>\n