Friday, November 2, 2012

The Close Relationship between Economic Growth and Carbon Emissions

Some readers didn't quite believe the premise in my reprinted Tuesday post How To Think About The Future (Redux). I'll repeat that assumption here.
As we consider the middle [IPCC] scenarios AIM 6.0 and MiniCAM 4.5, we must bear in mind this very important point:
All other things being equal, anthropogenic CO2 emissions are a proxy for economic growth *
* "a proxy for" in this context means "provide an alternative measurement of", or "stand in for"
As things stand, and in the foreseeable future, anthropogenic emissions from burning fossil fuels will rise if and only if the global economy is growing. See my recent post For Humans, The Economy Is Everything. Also see my much longer essay Economic Growth And Climate Change — No Way Out? (This long essay is not for the faint-hearted.)
I will use recent findings about economic growth and CO2 emissions in the United States to illustrate why my assumption still holds true. When the global economy blew-up in 2008-2009, data which would confirm the relationship between economic growth and CO2 emissions was not yet available. Now it is.
This text and graph are from Climate Central's Can U.S. Carbon Emissions Keep Falling? (pdf).
Box 1: Reductions in Gross Domestic Product Account for the Most Significant Share of the Recent Declines in CO2 Emissions
U.S. CO2 emissions in a given year can be viewed as the product of three quantities: 1) U.S. gross domestic product for that year, 2) the total amount of energy used per dollar of GDP that year (the energy intensity of the economy), and 3) the CO2 emissions per unit of energy used that year (the carbon intensity of energy):

Read more: http://oilprice.com/Finance/the-Economy/The-Close-Relationship-between-Economic-Growth-and-Carbon-Emissions.html

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