Fossil Fuel Subsidies – Understanding a Trillion Dollar Catastrophe

Thursday, March 23rd at 6pm (arrive at 5:30pm for beer specials) | Limelight Aspen

The fossil fuel industry is hugely profitable and over a century old. It’s also the primary cause of climate change. So why are we spending $5.9 trillion globally, each year, to subsidize it? How can we possibly hope to solve climate change when we continue to incentivize the burning of gas, oil, and coal?

Doug Koplow will dig on perhaps the most important and bipartisan climate solution of them all: ending fossil fuel subsidies. Doug is the founder of Earth Track in Cambridge, MA (www.earthtrack.net). For more than three decades, he has worked with environmental groups and international agencies to identify and measure environmentally harmful subsidies to natural resource extraction, and to document their pervasive reach and enormous scale. Redirecting these hundreds of billions of dollars per year is increasingly recognized as an important lever for reducing poverty, transitioning to cleaner energy, protecting biodiversity, and addressing climate change. He holds an MBA from the Harvard Business School and a BA in economics from Wesleyan University.