By Imagine what the world could do with $1 trillion. How many children that money could feed, how much clean water that money could provide to communities that need it, how many homes it could build for people with no place to live.
Instead, the governments of the world are handing $1 trillion to the fossil fuels industry every year. Oil companies are some of the richest in the world. The oil industry made record profits last year. So why on Earth are we spending $1 trillion to subsidize the oil industry’s dirty, destructive business instead of spending that money on clean, safe renewable energy and other things that would make our world more peaceful and our society more sustainable?
World leaders are meeting in Rio right now, and we’re taking part in a Twitter storm to call on them to #EndFossilFuelSubsidies. We want to make this hashtag a trending topic worldwide.
It’s as simple as clicking on the hashtag — #EndFossilFuelSubsidies — and retweeting anything you see there. Or tweeting this post. Or tweeting this awesome video starring Seasunz and J. Bless from Earth Amplified and featuring Stic.Man from Dead Prez.
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The folks over at Oil Change International put together this infographic based on their research that revealed the governments of the world might be spending even more than $1 trillion per year to subsidize the dirty oil industry. They write: “But what makes it even worse is that governments aren’t willing to own up to the fact that this is the case. That’s a lot of money to be wasting and hiding, and it could be put to better use for education, hunger, poverty, renewable energy, and many many other far-more valid uses.”
Click to enlarge.