Norman Myers and Jennifer Kent are the authors of Perverse Subsidies: How Tax Dollars Can Undercut the Environment and the Economy (Island Press, 2001).

"The Bush administration plans to oppose an international drive to phase out fossil fuel subsidies and increase financing for nonpolluting energy sources worldwide, administration officials said today. ... The White House says its opposition to the proposals is based on a desire to let the marketplace, rather than government, decide how quickly renewable energy sources are adopted worldwide."
--New York Times, July 14, 2001

In this excerpt from Perverse Subsidies: How Tax Dollars Can Undercut the Environment and the Economy, Myers and Kent explain that the fossil fuel industry is subsidized.
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The United States possesses less than 5 percent of the world's population but consumes 26 percent of the world's commercial energy. It consumes roughly twice as much energy per person and per unit of GNP as do Western Europe and Japan. By increasing the efficiency with which Americans utilize energy to Western European levels, the United States could save over $100 billion per year; by matching the efficiency of Japan, $200 billion per year. Overall, energy waste costs the U.S. economy over $300 billion per year -- more than the military budget. Conversely, energy conservation measures since the 1970s have saved $1 trillion.

The United States also emits one-quarter of all the carbon dioxide accumulating annually in the global atmosphere. In per capita terms, it emits roughly twice as much carbon dioxide as Germany, Russia, or Japan, almost three times as much as Italy, eight times as much as China, and 20 times as much as India. Fossil fuels contribute 90 percent of the United States' greenhouse-gas emissions (plus 90 percent of local air pollution and acid rain and the great majority of gases leading to smog). Yet by slashing fossil-fuel subsidies, the United States would cut its CO2 emissions to 16 percent below 1990 levels by 2010, thereby surpassing its Kyoto target by a sizeable margin (and reducing pollutants such as sulfur dioxide, nitrous oxide, and particulates). It would also generate energy savings of 13 percent.

U.S. energy subsidies in the mid-1990s totaled $25 billion (range $18-$32 billion), equivalent to $350 per American household. (Note, however, that certain estimates vary by an order of magnitude, depending upon definitions and criteria.) Of total energy subsidies, fossil-fuel and nuclear-energy subsidies amounted to $21 billion, or 84 percent of the total. Within the fossil-fuel category, the smallest subsidy went to natural gas, even though it is environmentally cleaner than oil or coal. Some minor subsidies also went to a miscellany of items, such as government-sponsored research and development and general investment tax credits.

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