"only" 500 BILLION. How is that small change

It's not small change, but when it is ~10% of the claimed figure I think "only" is the proper adjective.

It's what upsets me about these sorts of papers- "civilian" climate change skeptics/deniers point to them as evidence of the dishonesty of consensus community. They are able to take away the wrong message- that consensus community is stretching and manipulating the data, rather than there are $300-600B of subsidies for fossil fuels out there.

If the author of that article had to misrepresent in order to pump the number up by 10x we can assume that they didn't think 500 billion was a compelling enough number.

> Yeah, in the cited study is almost all externalities.

Negative externalities are a type of subsidy.

I think the point is it’s not a subsidy that could instead be spent somewhere else.

Closing the loophole of a negative externality absolutely would generate revenue that could be spent elsewhere. Carbon taxes are a perfect example.