A  UN report out this week on the causes and impacts of climate change makes a conclusion we’ve all heard before. Without urgent action—meaning within the next 15 years—the world will reach a point of no return. The drastic effects of climate change will be impossible to reverse with existing technologies. Unsurprisingly, the report keeps with the long tradition of climate change reports, each more dire than the one before, each defining the problem as bigger in its risk and quicker to arrive.

One genuinely surprising point it makes, however, is the extent to which the world’s governments subsidize fossil fuels. While some countries have committed money to new forms of energy, the effort has been long eclipsed by the