Two live counters: what the UK subsidises fossil fuels by, and what they cost us in lives.
Yes — subsidies, not costs. This headline figure is subsidies: tax reliefs, reduced VAT on domestic fuel and direct support to producers (OECD definition, Global Justice Now) — the same category the renewables “subsidy clock” counts. The human cost below is shown separately and is deliberately not added to this number. (The renewables clock, by contrast, folds “estimated indirect costs” into its own total.)
Conservative, fossil-specific figure (UK combustion emissions). For all-source air pollution the UK government's own committee, COMEAP, estimates 28,000–36,000 deaths a year.
Built the same way — a real-terms annual figure accumulated from 2002 — the fossil fuel total over the same window is larger.
The £227bn renewables figure traces to the Renewable Energy Foundation (REF). Despite the name, REF was founded in 2004 by the TV presenter Noel Edmonds — still its chairman — and is described by critics as an anti-wind-farm campaign group rather than a supporter of renewables. It does not disclose who funds it, and has shared a trustee with the climate-sceptic Global Warming Policy Foundation.
Andrew Montford, who promotes the renewables “subsidy clock”, is a long-standing figure in that same network (Net Zero Watch / GWPF).
The underlying subsidy totals draw on official registers — the point isn't that the numbers are invented, but that the framing comes from people campaigning against renewables, not fossil fuels. Sources: Wikipedia, DeSmog.
Fossil fuel companies' own scientists accurately forecast climate change as far back as the 1960s. Instead of warning the public, the industry funded a decades-long campaign to manufacture doubt — the same playbook the tobacco industry wrote.
Read the sourced timeline →This clock uses the same method as the renewables “Subsidy Clock”: take a single annual figure in real (inflation-adjusted) terms and accumulate it from a fixed start year. Because the annual figure is already in real terms, the running total is in today's money — no extra inflation step is needed.
This is a campaigning illustration, not a peer-reviewed estimate. Every figure is sourced below and editable in config.js.