Link of the Day: May 15 2014: IMF finds Canada subsidizing the fossil fuel industry the staggering sum of $34 billion a year, hitherto unrecorded in the mainstream media!

International Monetary Fund (Photo credit: Wikipedia)

Mitchell Anderson, a freelance reporter in Vancouver, has come up with a killer story in The Tyee, the West Coast radical journal.Quoting the super-conservative International Monetary Fund, he reveals that Canada is subsidizing fossil fuel use to the extent of $34 billion a year. This is in the form of externalized costs pursuant to using transportation fuels; direct financial support to producer oil companies (these two items alone amounting to 20 times the budget of Environment Canada); similar remissions to natural gas companies (amounting to 44 per cent more than Canada’s annual international aid) and so on, making these subsidies higher as a proportion of government revenue than in any country except Luxembourg and the United States.

There’s plenty more detail in this article: read it and rage! The IMF considers global subsidies to fossil fuel use total  $2 trillion a year.