And honestly, this is all beside the point--we can talk until we're blue in the face but who can afford to pay for climate change mitigation, but at the end of the day, someone has to do it, or we're all going to be much, much worse off than we are today, rich and poor.
Probably true in terms of overall quantity, but in terms of pollution or carbon emitted per watt of energy (or joule, or whatever) produced the 3rd world is probably worse.
Lots of dirty-burning, low-efficiency cook stoves out there running on (unavoidably) low-quality fuel. And lots of smoky, high CO2 emission two stroke engines in use.
Which is not to excuse Western emissions but simply to note that there's problems all over.
In practice we only get one planet, and trying to quantify whether taking care of it outweighs the loss of income of just letting the damage happen is not merely wrong, but outright terrifyingly inhuman.
It goes even beyond the Tyler Durden (Fight Club) car recall speech, which I won't talk about for obvious reasons.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Energy_subsidies
This is different from your source which estimates US fuel subsidies at over half a trillion
A little reading reveals the source of the discrepancy, according to your article
>The largest contributor to fossil fuel subsidies is the under-pricing of local air pollution, as the impacts of smog and particulate emissions have significant health impacts and are a contributor to early deaths.
so they are looking at the social costs of smog and emissions and including that in the calculations - which I understand some people might argue is a subsidy but it seems a little underhanded for the IMF to call it a subsidy in an economic report because that's getting pretty far from the ordinary use of the word subsidy.
I think we like to imagine that there is all this money floating around in fuel company subsidies that we could redirect to alleviating the economic effects of climate change. And that's the impression that this IMF report creates. And when we look at it this way then we don't have to face the reality that we in the West spend our lives ignoring. The reality that not everyone lives in the comfortable west where an economic downturn is an inconvenience. The reality that we live in a world where people are literally starving to death, and taking on these kinds of enormous economic burdens on a global scale would mean that even more people have to starve to death.
When we pretend that economic effects means the same thing to the 3rd world that it means to us in the west, when we pretend carbon neutrality is just an inconvenience and not life or death: Then we don't have to really struggle with questions like how certain are we that it's human activity that is causing these warnings. We can just say it's indisputable scientific consensus without worrying about who the scientists are and what they are actually saying or whether their continued funding is dependent on the veracity of global warming.