Estimated public spending since midnight UTC that lowers the price of fossil fuels below their market cost.

Nobody counts this as it happens. EarthNow takes a published figure for the whole day, divides it by the 86,400 seconds in a day, and multiplies by the seconds elapsed since midnight UTC. So the value climbs smoothly and is the right order of magnitude — but the smoothness is arithmetic, not observation. Nothing happening in the world is being watched in real time.

value = daily total ÷ 86,400 × seconds since 00:00 UTC

A consequence worth knowing: the counter resets at midnight UTC, not at your midnight. And because every signal advances at a constant rate, this page cannot tell you whether today is unusual. For that you need a measurement.

$7 trillion a year in explicit and implicit fossil fuel subsidies.

Daily total

$19.18B

Published by

IMF (2023)

The figure is theirs; the running total is ours. Cite them for the number, and EarthNow for what it looks like as it accumulates.

• Domestic fuel price policy, which is politically difficult to change quickly
• Whether subsidies are targeted at households who need them or applied to everyone
• Global fuel prices — subsidy bills rise exactly when budgets are tightest