Sydboy, I think you may be confused between subsidies for exploration and actual construction of wind,solar and fossil fuel....To the best of my knowledge, their is no subsidies given for the development and construction of the coal, oil and gas industry.
http://www.abc.net.au/news/2014-11-...-receive-4-billion-dollar-in-subsidie/5881814
'Subsidising dangerous climate change'
One of the report's authors, Shelagh Whitley from the Overseas Development Institute in London, said G20 governments are funding high carbon energy sources at the expense of renewable energy projects.
She said the exploration subsidies were just a fraction of the subsidies received by the fossil fuel industry every year in G20 countries.
"The fossil fuel industry writ large receives around $775 billion in subsidies," Ms Whitley argued.
"So that's much higher than what we are looking at here which is fossil fuel exploration."
Ms Whitley said the report was calling on G20 countries to immediately end subsidies for fossil fuel exploration.
"The reason we are looking at fossil fuel exploration is that we've been told in this past week by the IPCC (Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change) ... that we have to actually keep two-thirds of fossil fuel reserves in the ground if we are to avoid dangerous climate change," she said.
"These subsidies are the equivalent of subsidising dangerous climate change."
The report also called for more transparency in budget reporting and for the elimination of public finance for fossil fuel exploration.
The authors looked at publicly available government data on exploration subsidies and used Bloomberg and Rystad Energy databases for company and commodity information.
They noted that limited transparency and wide variations in data availability "posed major obstacles to the identification and estimation of fossil fuel subsidies."
The Minerals Council of Australia says Australian government funding and tax breaks for exploration are not subsidies but legitimate tax deductions for business.
