Governments and taxpayers spent about $500 billion last year supporting the production and consumption of fossil fuels, and removing inefficient subsidies for those fuels would raise national revenues, according to analyses by the Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development and the International Energy Agency. Subsidies to fossil-fuel consumers often fail to meet their intended objectives of alleviating energy poverty or promoting economic development and instead create wasteful use of energy, contribute to price volatility by blurring market signals, encourage fuel smuggling, and lower the competitiveness of renewable energy sources and energy efficient technologies, the agenci...