La energía verde es la realmente subvencionada. By Bjorn Lomborg

La energía verde es la realmente subvencionada. Por Bjorn Lomborg

Las renovables reciben tres veces más dinero por unidad de energía que los combustibles fósiles.
Wall Street Journal, Nov 11, 2013
http://online.wsj.com/news/articles/SB10001424127887324432404579051123500813210

Excerpts:

Durante 20 años el mundo ha intentado subvencionar la energía verde en vez de centrarse en hacerla más eficiente. Hoy España tira alrededor del 1% del PIB en energías verdes como la solar y la eólica. Esos €11 000 millones anuales son más de lo que España gasta en educación superior.

A finales de este siglo, con los actuales compromisos, esos esfuerzos de los españoles habrán retrasado el impacto del calentamiento global por unas sesenta y una horas, según las estimaciones del reputado modelo dinámico integral económico-climático de la Universidad de Yale. ¿Cientos de miles de millones de dólares para sesenta y una horas adicionales? Es un mal negocio.

Pero cuando se critican esos ineficientes subsidios verdes, pueden estar seguros de que los defensores señalarán que el planeta subsidia los combustibles fósiles aun más. No deberíamos hacerlo con ninguno. Pero la desinformación que rodea los subsidios energéticos es considerable y ayuda a impedir que el mundo tome medidas razonables.

Tres son los mitos de los subsidios de combustibles fósiles que vale la pena desmontar. El primero es la alegación [...] de que los EE UU subsidian más los combustibles fósiles que la energía verde. No es así.

[Se estima] que en 2010 [esos] subsidios alcanzaron los $4000 millones anuales. Esto incluye $240 millones en inversiones para instalaciones de carbón limpio [que a este traductor no le parece algo muy alejado del rollito verde]; [y] una deducción de gastos sobre la amortización de equpos de control de la polución [algo que los verdes deberían aplaudir, no?]. Las fuentes renovables recibieron más del triple de esa cifra, unos $14 000 millones. En todo esto no consideramos $2500 millones para energía nuclear [que ahorra emisiones de CO2].

Aun más de lo que parece, es mayor el sesgo real del gasto a favor de la energía verde. Ya que las turbinas eólicas y otras fuentes renovables producen mucha menos energía que los combustibles fósiles, los EE UU están pagando más por menos. La electricidad que se obtiene a partir del carbón se subsidia a un 5% de un centavo por cada kWh producido, mientras que la eólica recibe cerca de un centavo por kWh. Para solar, el coste para el contribuyente es de 77 centavos por kWh.

Los críticos de los subsidios de combustibles fósiles, como el científico climático Jim Hansen, también indican que el inmenso tamaño de los subsidios globales es evidencia del poder que sobre los gobiernos tienen las compañías de combustibles fósiles y los escépticos del cambio climático. [En opinión de este traductor, Jim está mayor.]

[Estos] subsidios globales exceden los de las renovables en dólares nominales — $523 miles de millones sobre $88 miles de millones [para las renovables], según la International Energy Agency. Pero la disparidad se revierte cuando la proporción se toma en consideración. Los combustibles fósiles suponen más del 80% de la energía global, mientras que la moderna energía verde supone cerca del 5%. Esto significa que las renovables reciben aun tres veces más dinero por unidad de energía.

Pero mucho más importante, los críticos ignoran que estos subsidios de combustibles fósiles pertenecen casi exclusivamente a países no occidentales. Doce de tales naciones son responsables del 75% de los subsidios globales de tales combustibles. Irán es el primero con $82 000 millones anuales, seguido por Arabia Saudí con $61 000 millones. Rusia, India y China presupuestan entre $30 000 y $40 000 millones y Venezuela, Egipto, Iraq, Emiratos Árabes Unidos, Indonesia, México y Argelia son el resto.

Estos subsidios no tienen nada que ver con intentar congraciarse con compañías petroleras o con regalar a los escépticos del calentamiento global. Este gasto es una forma de que estos gobiernos compren estabilidad política: en Venezuela, la gasolina se vende a 5.9 centavos el galón [el galón son 3.8 litros], lo que cuesta al gobierno unos $22 000 millones anuales, más del doble de lo que se gasta en sanidad.

Un tercer mito lo difunde un reciente informe del IMF, "Reforma de los subsidios energéticos — Lecciones e implicaciones" ("Energy Subsidy Reform—Lessons and Implications"). La organización anunció en marzo que había descubierto unos $1.4 billones de subsidios a los combustibles fósiles que nadie había visto. De esa cifra, alega el informe, $700 000 millones vienen del mundo desarrollado. [Este traductor está parcialmente de acuerdo con el informe del IMF y cree que Lomborg yerra al no mencionar lo positivas que son muchas de las valoraciones y recomendaciones del informe. Los subsidios en países no desarrollados son una salvajada para esas economías, además de que benefician en igual proporción a todos los consumidores, es decir, benefician también a quienes no los necesitan, como los jerarcas del partido dominante o los crazy mullahs. Otra cosa es lo que comenta Lomborg, que es muy razonable IMHO: el rollo este de estimar costes que deberían ser impuestos y encima los suben más que los locos de Bruselas y que al no ser recaudados los meten en la línea de subsidios.]

La gasolina y el diesel en los EE UU por sí solos son cerca de la mitad de esos $700 000 millones que el IMF dice son subsidios. La gasolina y el diesel deberían tener impuestos más altos, dice el informe, así que el IMF cuenta tales impuestos no impuestos como "subsidios" [este traductor barrunta que estas ideas tan brillantes pudiera ser que surjan de la propia Administración Federal porque casan con las líneas, o más bien sinuosas curvas, del razonamiento de gente con la preparación del Community Organizer in Chief]. Así, la polución del aire amerita un impuesto de 34 centavos/galón, según los modelos del IMF, mientras que los accidentes de tráfico y la congestión deberían añardir cerca de $1 por galón.

Además debería haber un IVA del 17% como en otros países, según el IMF, o cerca de $0.80/galón [es fácil de engordar esta estimación, el gobierno español puede sugerir el vigente 21%]. La suma que tales impuestos recaudarían, $350 000 millones, se tratan como un subsidio.

[Esto tiene varios problemas.] La organización asume un coste social del CO2 de cinco veces el que actualmente emplea la Unión Europea. Los daños atribuidos a la polución del aire son 10 veces mayores que las estimaciones de la Unión Europea. ¿Y qué tienen que ver los accidentes de tráfico con los subsidios a la gasolina?

Por último, el IMF ignora en la práctica los 49.5 centavos de impuestos sobre el galón de gasolina que el consumidor americano paga realmente. Los modelos cancelan, inexplicablemente, este impuesto con un "coste internacional de envío" [por mar, oleoductos, etc.]. Pero incluso si Vd acepta las estimaciones del IMF de los costes de la polución y el IVA al estilo europeo, el total que dice el IMF que no se recauda se reduce a solo 44 centavos/galón — menos que los impuestos reales en los EE UU por cents/galón. [...]

Información inexacta como esta perjudica innecesariamente la toma de politicas públicas. Estoy a favor de terminar con los subsidios globales de combustibles fósiles — y con los subsidios a las energías verdes. Subsidiar energías verdes de primera generación, ineficientes, hace a los acomodados sentirse bien consigo mismos, pero no transformará los mercados energéticos.

[...]

El Dr. Lomborg, director del Copenhagen Consensus Center, es el autor de "How Much Have Global Problems Cost the World? A Scoreboard from 1900 to 2050" (Cambridge, 2013).
---
Translation to Catalan: http://www.bipartisanalliance.com/2013/11/lenergia-verda-es-la-realment.html. By Un Liberal Recalcitrant

---
Green Energy Is the Real Subsidy Hog. By Bjorn Lomborg
Renewables receive three times as much money per energy unit as fossil fuels.
Wall Street Journal, Nov 11, 2013
http://online.wsj.com/news/articles/SB10001424127887324432404579051123500813210

For 20 years the world has tried subsidizing green technology instead of focusing on making it more efficient. Today Spain spends about 1% of GDP throwing money at green energy such as solar and wind power. The $11 billion a year is more than Spain spends on higher education.

At the end of the century, with current commitments, these Spanish efforts will have delayed the impact of global warming by roughly 61 hours, according to the estimates of Yale University's well-regarded Dynamic Integrated Climate-Economy model. Hundreds of billions of dollars for 61 additional hours? That's a bad deal.

Yet when such inefficient green subsidies are criticized, their defenders can be relied on to point out that the world subsidizes fossil fuels even more heavily. We shouldn't subsidize either. But the misinformation surrounding energy subsidies is considerable, and it helps keep the world from enacting sensible policy.

Three myths about fossil-fuel subsidies are worth debunking. The first is the claim, put forth by organizations such as the Environmental Law Institute, that the U.S. subsidizes fossil fuels more heavily than green energy. Not so.

The U.S. Energy Information Administration estimated in 2010 that fossil-fuel subsidies amounted to $4 billion a year. These include $240 million in credit for investment in Clean Coal Facilities; a tax deferral worth $980 million called excess of percentage over cost depletion; and an expense deduction on amortization of pollution-control equipment. Renewable sources received more than triple that figure, roughly $14 billion. That doesn't include $2.5 billion for nuclear energy.

Actual spending skews even more toward green energy than it seems. Since wind turbines and other renewable sources produce much less energy than fossil fuels, the U.S. is paying more for less. Coal-powered electricity is subsidized at about 5% of one cent for every kilowatt-hour produced, while wind power gets about a nickel per kwh. For solar power, it costs the taxpayer 77 cents per kwh.
Critics of fossil-fuel subsidies, such as climate scientist Jim Hansen, also suggest that the immense size of global subsidies is evidence of the power over governments wielded by fossil-fuel companies and climate-change skeptics. Global fossil-fuel subsidies do exceed those for renewables in raw dollars—$523 billion to $88 billion, according to the International Energy Agency. But the disparity is reversed when proportion is taken into account. Fossil fuels make up more than 80% of global energy, while modern green energy accounts for about 5%. This means that renewables still receive three times as much money per energy unit.

But much more important, the critics ignore that these fossil-fuel subsidies are almost exclusive to non-Western countries. Twelve such nations account for 75% of the world's fossil-fuel subsidies. Iran tops the list with $82 billion a year, followed by Saudi Arabia at $61 billion. Russia, India and China spend between $30 billion and $40 billion, and Venezuela, Egypt, Iran, U.A.E., Indonesia, Mexico and Algeria make up the rest.

These subsidies have nothing to do with cozying up to oil companies or indulging global-warming skeptics. The spending is a way for governments to buy political stability: In Venezuela, gas sells at 5.8 cents a gallon, costing the government $22 billion a year, more than twice what is spent on health care.

A third myth is propagated by a recent International Monetary Fund report, "Energy Subsidy Reform—Lessons and Implications." The organization announced in March that it had discovered an extra $1.4 trillion in fossil-fuel subsidies that everyone else overlooked. Of that figure, the report claims, $700 billion comes from the developed world.

U.S. gasoline and diesel alone make up about half of the IMF's $700 billion in alleged subsidies. Gasoline and diesel deserve more taxation, the report says, so the IMF counts taxes that were not levied as "subsidies." Thus air pollution merits a 34-cents-per-gallon tax, according to the IMF models, while traffic accidents and congestion should add about $1 per gallon.

According to the IMF, the U.S. also should have a 17% value-added tax like other countries, at about 80 cents per gallon. The combined $350 billion such taxes allegedly would raise gets spun as a subsidy.

The assumptions behind the IMF's math have some problems. The organization assumes a social price of carbon dioxide at five times what Europe currently charges. The air-pollution damages are upward of 10 times higher than the European Union estimates. And what do traffic accidents have to do with gasoline subsidies?

Finally, the IMF effectively ignores the 49.5 cents per gallon in gasoline taxes the U.S. consumer actually pays. The models cancel out this tax, inexplicably, with an "international shipping cost." But even if you accept the IMF's estimated pollution costs and the European-style VAT, the total tax the IMF says goes uncollected comes to only about 44 cents per gallon—or less than the actual U.S. tax of 49.5 cents per gallon. The real under-taxation is zero. The $350 billion is a figment of the IMF's balance sheet.

Inaccurate information of this sort is needlessly misinforming public policy. I'm in favor of ending global fossil-fuel subsidies—and green-energy subsidies. Subsidizing first-generation, inefficient green energy might make well-off people feel good about themselves, but it won't transform the energy market.

Green-energy initiatives must focus on innovations, making new generations of technology work better and cost less. This will eventually power the world in a cleaner and cheaper way than fossil fuels. That effort isn't aided by the perpetuation of myths.

Dr. Lomborg, director of the Copenhagen Consensus Center, is the author of "How Much Have Global Problems Cost the World? A Scoreboard from 1900 to 2050" (Cambridge, 2013).

Bailouts and Systemic Insurance. By Giovanni Dell'Ariccia and Lev Ratnovski

Bailouts and Systemic Insurance. By Giovanni Dell'Ariccia and Lev Ratnovski
IMF Working Paper No. 13/233
November 12, 2013
http://www.imf.org/external/pubs/cat/longres.aspx?sk=41048.0

Summary: We revisit the link between bailouts and bank risk taking. The expectation of government support to failing banks creates moral hazard—increases bank risk taking. However, when a bank’s success depends on both its effort and the overall stability of the banking system, a government’s commitment to shield banks from contagion may increase their incentives to invest prudently and so reduce bank risk taking. This systemic insurance effect will be relatively more important when bailout rents are low and the risk of contagion (upon a bank failure) is high. The optimal policy may then be not to try to avoid bailouts, but to make them “effective”: associated with lower rents.

Excerpts

When banks expect to be supported in a crisis, they take more risk, because shareholders, managers, and other stakeholders believe they can shift negative risk realizations to the taxpayer. So the expectations of support increase the probability of bank failures that governments want to avoid in the first place.

This paper highlights that when there are risks beyond the control of individual banks, such as the risk of contagion, the expectation of government support, while creating moral hazard, also entails a virtuous “systemic insurance” effect on bank risk taking. The reason is that bailouts protect banks against contagion, removing an exogenous source of risk, and this may increase bank incentives to monitor loans. The interaction between the moral hazard and systemic insurance effects of expected bailouts is the focus of this paper.

The risk of contagion is one of the reasons that makes banks special. While a car company going bankrupt is an opportunity for its competitors, a bank going bankrupt is a potential threat to the industry, especially when the failing bank is large. Banks are exposed to each other directly through the interbank market, and indirectly through the real economy and …nancial markets. While banks have some control over direct exposures, the indirect links are largely beyond an individual bank’s control. The threat of contagion affects bank incentives. The key mechanism that we consider in this paper is that when a bank can fail due to exogenous circumstances, it does not invest as much to protect itself from idiosyncratic risk. Indeed, would you watch your cholesterol intake while eating on a plane that is likely to crash? Or save money for retirement when living in a war zone? Moreover, making the threat of contagion endogenous to the risk choices of all banks generates a strategic complementarity that ampli…es initial results: banks take more risk when other banks take more risk, because risk taking of other banks increases the threat of contagion. [While we focus on the risk that a bank failure imposes on other banks, other papers have focused on the potential bene…ts for competing banks that can buy assets of a distressed institution at …resale prices, possibly with government support to the buyer.]


Under these circumstances, when the government commits to stem the systemic effects of bank failure, it has two effects on bank incentives. The …rst is the classical moral hazard effect described in much of the literature. The second is a systemic insurance effect that increases banks’incentives to monitor loans (this is similar to the effect identi…ed for macro shocks by Cordella and Levy-Yeyati, 2003, and to that of IMF lending to sovereigns in Corsetti et al., 2006). The promise of bailout removes a risk outside the control of a bank and increases its return to monitoring. Going back to our risky ‡ight parable, how would your choice of meal change if you had a parachute?

Formally, we develop a model of financial intermediation where banks use deposits (or debt) and their own capital to fund a portfolio of risky loans. The bank portfolio is subject to two sources of risk. The fi…rst is idiosyncratic and under the control of the bank. Think about this risk as dependent on the quality of a bank’s borrowers, which the bank can control through costly monitoring or screening. The second source of risk is contagion. Think about this, for example, as a form of macro risk. When a bank of systemic importance fails, it has negative effects on the real economy, possibly triggering a recession. A deep enough recession can lead even the best borrowers into trouble and, as a consequence, can cause the failure of other banks independently of the quality of their own portfolio. The risk of contagion is exogenous to individual banks (it cannot be managed or diversi…ed), but it is endogenous to the …nancial system as a whole, since it depends on risk taking by all banks.

These two sources of risk are associated to two inefficiencies. First, banks are protected by limited liability and informational asymmetries prevent investors from pricing risk at the margin. As a result, in equilibrium banks will take excessive idiosyncratic risk. As in other models, this problem can be ameliorated through capital requirements. The second ine¢ ciency stems from externalities. When individual banks do not take into account the effect of their risk taking on other banks, they take too much risk relative to the coordinated solution. And since banks are also affected by the externality, this exogenous source of risk reduces the private return to portfolio monitoring/screening. Bank increase idiosyncratic risk, increasing also the contagion externality. Capital requirements cannot fully correct this problem: even a bank fully funded by capital will take excessive risk when exposed to risk externalities.

Against this background, government intervention in support of failing banks has two opposite effects on incentives. It exacerbates the moral hazard problem stemming from limited liability, but reduces the externality problem associated with contagion. The extent of moral hazard depends on the rents that the government leaves to bailed out banks, while the importance of the "systemic insurance" effect depends on the probability of contagion. Thus, there are parameter values .low bailout rents and a high risk of contagion -- for which the promise of government intervention leads to lower bank risk and better ex ante outcomes.

The "systemic insurance" effects continue to be present when we allow banks to correlate their investments. The threat of contagion may induce banks to excessively correlate their portfolios, because contagion discourages strategies that pay off when other banks fail. Such correlation may be undesirable for a number of reasons .ine¢ cient distribution of credit in the economy, lower bank profits, or an increased probability of simultaneous bank failures (which are socially costly; Acharya, 2009). We show that the expectations of government support may reduce banks'incentives to correlate their investments by decreasing the risk of contagion. It is important to interpret our results with caution. First, they should not be seen as downplaying the moral hazard implications of bailouts. Rather, we argue that such implications have to be balanced with systemic insurance effects. Systemic insurance may be important for some, but not all parameter values. The best illustration for the case where systemic insurance effects might dominate would be a financial system on the brink of the crisis (with weak banks and high probability of contagion) with well-designed bank resolution rules (which minimize bailout rents). Second, we focus on ex ante effects of policies. Ex post considerations may be different and depend e.g. on the difference between the economic costs of bank bankruptcy and that of the use of public funds. Third, and most critically, we assume that the government is able to commit to a given bailout strategy. In a richer model with potential time inconsistencies in the government reaction function, outcomes may be more complex. In particular, banks may find it optimal to take correlated risks if they believe that bailouts will be more likely when many of them fail simultaneously.

Several recent papers have explored the effects of expected government support on bank risk taking. In these papers, bailouts increase risk taking and generate a strategic complementarity among banks when the probability of bailouts increases with the share of the banking system that is in distress. We add to that literature by introducing a risk externality in the form of an undiversi…able contagion risk. This risk externality creates an additional strategic complementarity in risk taking, one that does not result from government policy. In contrast to the existing literature, by preventing contagion, bailouts can reduce the strategic externalities and bank risk taking. The paper relates to the literature on government intervention as a means of preventing contagion. The observation that by removing exogenous risk the government can improve banks’ monitoring incentives was …first made by Cordella and Levy-Yeyati (2003), in the context of macroeconomic shocks. Our model builds on their work by making these shocks endogenous to the banking system, thus offering a link between individual bank risk taking and systemic risk. [Orszag and Stiglitz (2002) use the creation of fire departments as a parable to describe how risk taking incentives are affected by externalities and public policy. In their model (like here), individuals do not take into account the effects of reproof houses on reducing the risk of fire damage to their neighbors’homes, and invest too little in fire safety. The introduction of a fire department reduces the risk of a fire, but further worsens individual incentives, as it reduces the probability that a fire spreads from one house to another. To extend their parable, our paper is more about condo buildings rather than single-family houses. If the rest of the building burns down and collapses, a condo owner gets little benefit from having …reproofed her own apartment. Then, the introduction of a fire department makes individual safety measures more valuable as it reduces the probability of total meltdown.]