The existing subsidies are often specific to fossil fuels (heating oil and natural gas). You don't get them for installing electric heat pumps.

The better alternative would be to provide the subsidy in cash and let the poor decide what they need for themselves, instead of trying to choose for them between heating oil vs. investing in heat pumps vs. better insulation vs. turning down the thermostat and using the money for something else they need more.

You give them the money, and they'll spend it on blackjack and hookers. Regardless of whether you give them subsidy money, you have to charge higher prices for energy if you want any hope of reducing fossil fuel use.

> You give them the money, and they'll spend it on blackjack and hookers.

Stuff is fungible. If you give someone money for heating oil then they'll spend it on heating oil and use the money they would have spent on heating oil for blackjack and hookers if they want to. The only thing you're really doing is forcing them to buy heating oil instead of actual substitutes for burning more heating oil, like heat pumps or better insulation. Because one way or another they need to heat their living space, but if you satisfy that requirement for them in a specific way, it still frees up resources that they would have had to use for that and can now use for unrelated things like blackjack and hookers.

I would say that's an administrative issue that's a bit tangential.

Carbon tax + per head tax credit. Big consumers (the rich) end up paying, small consumers (the poor) end up with cash in their pocket, the government has no extra revenue that could lead to perverse incentives.

That doesn't fix the problem.

Buying oil is already expensive, yet we buy too much of it.

It has to be expensive enough to depress consumption and/or promote more efficient use. Countries where oil is expensive have better fuel efficiency, for example.

Doubling the price doesn't help much (inelastic). Look at countries with huge petrol taxes and they still use heaps: https://www.globalpetrolprices.com/gasoline_prices/

I'm in New Zealand, and plenty of us have serious gas guzzlers even though petrol is far more expensive than in the US. A bunch of Scandinavian countries are twice as expensive as the US.