Do we make solar PV companies to pay into funds for people who get sick from heavy metal poisoning (which does happen and is expected to continue happening, it turns out solar is cheaper if you ship the waste to a third world country)? Do hydroelectric dams pay for water loss from evaporation?
I don't disagree that the externalities are worse for fossil fuels than other energy sources, and that's a good reason to decarbonize our energy supply. But externalities are exactly that: impacts external to the cost of power generation. When someone says "we subsidized X industry by $Y" to me it means that $Y worth of goods and services was given to that industry. In reality, the fossil fuel industry received nowhere near that amount of money. This "subsidy" is really a speculative cost of externalities. Especially when the projected cost of externalities vary widely, equating externalities with subsidies comes off as intellectually dishonest. If externalities account for effectively the entirety of this so called subsidy, you're better off calling it an externality rather than trying to redefine a term.
I don't disagree that the externalities are worse for fossil fuels than other energy sources, and that's a good reason to decarbonize our energy supply. But externalities are exactly that: impacts external to the cost of power generation. When someone says "we subsidized X industry by $Y" to me it means that $Y worth of goods and services was given to that industry. In reality, the fossil fuel industry received nowhere near that amount of money. This "subsidy" is really a speculative cost of externalities. Especially when the projected cost of externalities vary widely, equating externalities with subsidies comes off as intellectually dishonest. If externalities account for effectively the entirety of this so called subsidy, you're better off calling it an externality rather than trying to redefine a term.