This seems to be confusion between "The United States Federal Government" and the entire population within the United States.
The Constitution divides responsibilities between the federal government, state governments, and the people. Education is left to the states which largely leave it up to localities.
It's kind of like saying that "The United States spends ten times as much on army helmets as it does on state parks". Well, duh, the states pay for state parks.
It also has the issue of calculating negative externalities to add to the "cost" of fossil fuels without attempting to understand the positive externalities.
The reasoning is "we will eventually have to pay for climate change and air pollution, so let's add that to the cost calculation for accuracy." This is reasonable (depending on the accuracy of your estimates) but it has to be accompanied by another calculation -- what would we have to pay for in the absence of fossil fuels that we're not paying for now? Likely quite a bit, at the very least in the loss of tax revenue caused by the economic slowdown. An estimate that looks at the cost of consequences is meaningless if you don't include all the relevant consequences of both action and inaction.
So, I think we shouldn't subsidize fossil fuels, but the headline is misleading. The article doesn't seem to give hard numbers, but it is comparing fossil fuel subsidies to federal education spending. I think that most government education money comes from state budgets in the U.S.
“A new International Monetary Fund (IMF) study shows that USD$5.2 trillion was spent globally on fossil fuel subsidies in 2017. The equivalent of over 6.5% of global GDP of that year”
Such a waste. Another example of how subsidies result in bad incentives. It’s surprising that renewables have even reached their current level with such gross inequality prevailing. Imagine how much cleaner the air would be without these subsidies.
In the U.S. we spend the following on tax subsidies each year:
1. Renewable energy: $7.3 billion
2. Energy efficiency: $4.8 billion
3. Fossil fuels: $3.2 billion
4. Nuclear energy: $1.1 billion
The subsidy number you're referring to is calcuated by adding negative externalities related to air pollution and climate change to the numbers. Those estimates don't reflect funds that could have been spent elsewhere and it doesn't reflect funding priority.
This article calculates "fossil fuel subsidies" using an expansive definition that includes negative externalities and arrives at $649 billion. People might assume that "subsidies" means things like tax breaks for industry by the federal government. That is more like $4 billion. The article uses the narrowest possible defintion of "education spending" to mean the funding of the department of education, which is $68 billion but doesn't operate any schools. If you were to count what Americans actually spend on public education at local and state levels, it's actually like $700 billion.
Then again, it's kind of crazy to pick up negative externalities in a calculation of a "subsidy." By that reasoning, anything measurably bad that the government hasn't outlawed yet is a "subsidy" if you look at it the right way. How much do we spend in the U.S. subsidizing opiod addiction? Murder? Car crashes?
The Constitution divides responsibilities between the federal government, state governments, and the people. Education is left to the states which largely leave it up to localities.
It's kind of like saying that "The United States spends ten times as much on army helmets as it does on state parks". Well, duh, the states pay for state parks.