Climate-damaging subsidies correspond to negative CO2 prices

There has long been a debate about climate-damaging subsidies in the German transport sector, and the financial restrictions resulting from the Federal Constitutional Court’s budget judgement at the end of 2023 have intensified the debate. This dossier is the first to convert the level of subsidies in the transport sector into negative CO2 prices to present a scientific categorisation of their significance for climate policy. The concept of implicit negative CO2 prices shows the extent to which subsidies implicitly reward citizens for emitting a tonne of CO2, rather than paying for the emissions.