The headline is very misleading.<p>1. This was a meeting of the G20; it's LARGE nations, not RICH nations.<p>2. Poor nations are responsible for the overwhelming majority of fossil fuel subsidies. The worst offenders are China, Russia, Saudi Arabia, Brazil, and Mexico. Someone else noted that Saudi Arabia was a major blocker of an agreement to cut subsidies, and someone asked why "we" (ie, the US/Europe) don't just ignore them and go ahead and cut subsidies ourselves. The answer is because Saudi Arabia is the one doing the subsidising; only they can cut their own subsidies.<p>3. What subsidies rich countries do provide tend to be highly contentious, and depending on how you measure them are either small or non-existent. A poor country might sell petrol and heating oil for a fraction of its cost of production, which is an obvious subsidy to the oil and gas industry. For, eg, the US, most if its "subsidy" is stuff like IRS rules that say that a petroleum company can count most of a fine for an oil spill as a business expense. Should a fine be classified as a business expense? If you think it shouldn't be, the fact that the IRS (partially) disagrees represents a small subsidy. Then again, a lot of fines do get counted as expenses, and the US is hardly alone in having rules like that. Similarly, a lot of coal is mined in the Powder Basin Region, which is not designated as a coal producing region. Under US law, land in coal producing regions is subject to slightly higher leases than land outside them, which means the coal companies who lease land in the Powder Basin are paying slightly less than they "should" be paying. Or alternatively, coal companies who lease land in other coal regions are paying slightly more. Or maybe coal companies should pay whatever the law specifies; it's not like there's any global standard on what the right cost should for leasing coal reserves. But if you think that the US has magically set the perfect price for coal producing regions, AND that the Powder Basin Region should totally be designated a coal producing region, then sure, that's a small subsidy for the companies who lease land in the Powder Basin. And so on.<p>In short, better headline: Poor oil producers say "no thanks" to suggestions from rich countries that they should cut their subsidies for domestic consumption.