| On Monday, Canada, the world's fourth-largest oil producer, finally delivered on an old promise to cut government support for inefficient fossil fuel subsidies. Canada environment minister Steven Guilbeault told reporters federal subsidies for oil and gas will now only support projects that "decarbonize the sector and result in significant greenhouse gas emissions reductions," fulfilling a commitment made by all Group of 20 nations in 2009. Will it matter? On its face, anything that makes fossil fuels reflect their true price tilts the balance toward clean energy, which has already become cheaper than fossil fuels in many places. And that's before calculating the environmental toll of extracting and burning gas, oil and coal. But will Canada follow through? A 2022 study that looked at 118 measures to repeal fossil fuel subsidies in 155 countries from 1990 to 2015 found they failed at a "remarkably high rate." On average, governments reinstated the subsidies or rolled back changes after about 18 months. Nearly 90 percent of these efforts failed within five years because of economic and political pressures. "Making these reforms stick," the study concluded, "is exceptionally difficult." Social unrest and the disruption to the economy from protests, inflation, currency devaluation and high energy prices were all factors contributing to governments' backtracking on their promises. The reality is that governments will not stop handing out cash to the oil industry unless there are clean, affordable and — this is key — cheaper alternatives on hand. Without this, write the authors, "political leadership has limited impact on fossil fuel taxes and subsidies." Canada and the rest of the G-20 may well announce they'll roll back much of the $6 trillion or so in global fossil fuel subsidies. But unless we as a society invest even more in building out a new clean-energy sector, those promises will go up in smoke. | 
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