Dutch Lawmakers Move Toward Phasing Out Fossil Fuel Subsidies After Highway Blockade: The dutch parliament "approved a motion requiring the Dutch Cabinet to come up with a plan to phase out fossil fuel subsidies".
Lucas Winnips (Extinction Rebellion, organisator of #StopFossieleSubsidies): “After monthlong of daily protests and more than 9,000 arrests, the Dutch Parliament asked the Cabinet to come up with scenarios for a phaseout of fossil fuel subsidies. During this campaign, we achieved a transformation, I think, of Dutch society, with three-quarters of the people now wanting a phaseout of fossil fuel subsidies, and even a third of the people wanting an immediate stop on fossil fuel subsidies. And that is the Extinction Rebellion demand. So, a big win.”
Some years ago, kids successfully sued the dutch government "to protect citizens’ rights in face of climate change" and it looks like their government is respecting the outcome of that lawsuit.
Subsidies for fossil fuels are at an all time high and surged to record $7 trillion for 2022 at rate of $13m a minute, including indirect subsidies. This is madness:
This is madness, it needs to be stopped and there is an argument to be made that you could make fossil fuel subsidies illegal when governments have the legal obligation to protect their citizens from the consequences of rampant climate change.
The problem here is that the worst offenders are countries like Russia, Saudi Arabia, Iran and Venezuela, which are unlikely to stop that practice as rising prices for unsubsidied fuel leads to riots, which is something that especially those totalitarian states can't afford. So they keep messing up the real cost of fossil fuels to keep their citizens in a calm state of numbness, happy to drive around.
I have no solution for this.
For western states, you could ostracize and ban fossil fuel subsidies, install harsh carbon taxes while limiting carbon offsetting and head off the consequences of rising prices with a Universal Basic Income, while redirecting part of the money into renewables. But making this policy a global standard is a fantasy. Good luck convincing Russia to ban fossil fuel subsidies and installing a basic income.
As a guy on Bluesky correctly argued when we discussed this: There’s the rub.
However, it's a good move by the dutch government to phase out all fossil fuel subsidies and the lesson here is: Inconvenient radical protest and lawsuits work. The german chapter of the Last Generation, derided by its critics as "eco-terrorists", rightly blocked and painted a dutch flag on a highway to celebrate.
Congrats and keep on being inconvenient, because the fuckers keep fucking: Behind ExxonMobil’s contrarian $60bn oil bet: "It’s a massive oil deal that demonstrates ExxonMobil’s bullishness on longish-term oil demand and prices".
Exxon and any other entity that ramps up fossil fuel production or subsidizes it needs to be sued into nonexistence on the basis of governments legal obligations to protect its citizens. Court decisions in the netherlands and germany point into a future where this is possible.
And anyone who's trying to tell you that it's climate activists who are the problem is either delusional or lying.
I wrote about why radical climate protest is upholding the law here.