Fossil fuel subsidies: how can we end our addiction?

There is a long history of government intervention in energy markets. For both political and economic reasons, countries have always subsidized the production of cheap and abundant fossil energy. Over the last hundred years, the availability of inexpensive fossil-fuel energy has been a hallmark of the growth of most countries—including both the industrial growth of the last century and the information-intensive growth of our current era. In both high- and low-income countries, government subsidies have contributed to the world’s addiction to cheap, easily available fossil energy