Indeed, in the industrialized world — us — they dropped a record 7%.
Unfortunately, the major reason wasn’t the increasing use of renewable energy.
It was the global recession set off in 2008 by the U.S. subprime mortgage crisis.
By contrast, increasing emissions in the developing world, led by the expanding economies of China (annual emissions up 9%) and India (up 6%), completely offset the 7% cut in the developed world.
These estimates come from the Netherlands Environmental Assessment Agency (NEAA), a leading monitor of global emissions, funded by the Dutch government.
Canada reported in April our total greenhouse gas emissions dropped by 2.1% in 2008 as the recession began to kick in, but won’t have the 2009 figure until next April.
The reality is recessions are the only things that dramatically and consistently reduce emissions, not publicly-subsidized wind turbines, solar panels, or the shell game of buying and selling carbon credits.
The reason is simple. When people and nations become poorer, they have less money to buy things, which means it takes less fossil fuel energy to provide them.
Conversely, when an economy grows, emissions rise.
As the NEAA notes, 2009 was “the first time since the 1992 recession that global CO2 (carbon dioxide) emissions have not increased. Previous recessions due to large increases in oil price(s) led to global decreases in CO2 emissions in 1974-1975 and 1980-1982.”
When the Kyoto accord was crafted, its creators arbitrarily and retroactively factored into their calculations massive reductions in carbon dioxide emissions prompted by the recession following the collapse of the Soviet Union.
This accounting trick was designed to help Europe meet its reduction targets and gave Russia — an environmental basket case — billions of dollars of “hot air” credits to sell to nations with much better environmental records.
Despite constant green propaganda that reducing emissions leads to more jobs and greater prosperity, real-world experience indicates the opposite.
Given the present unreliability of renewable energy, which can’t provide the on-demand power an industrialized economy needs, the only way governments can reduce emissions — other than by accounting tricks — is through recessions and delaying economic recovery.
Of course, governments didn’t create the subprime mortgage crisis to lower emissions and you’d think no government would deliberately pursue such policies.
But that’s exactly what our federal government is constantly being urged to do by those who advocate putting a price on our carbon dioxide emissions ahead of the United States.
Not only would this mean deliberately hobbling our economy in relation to our largest trading partner, it would drive even more industry, investment and jobs offshore to countries that have no intention of pricing carbon.
As we head into the next round of interminable UN global negotiations to draft a successor to Kyoto in Cancun this November, let’s understand what’s really being debated.
Specifically, how much more are we willing to lower our standard of living — how much poorer are we prepared to make ourselves — to cut emissions?
And how many hundreds of billions of dollars are we prepared, along with other industrialized nations, to ship to developing countries, in order to perform the “mission impossible” of lowering their emissions while growing their economies?
Amid the hysteria coming our way in Cancun about doing “whatever it takes” to “save the planet” because 2010 was “the warmest year ever” — meaning, less spectacularly, the warmest in the last 150 years or so of comparable temperature data, as opposed to the 4.5-billion-year history of the Earth — these will be the real choices we face.
Let’s not allow ourselves to be stampeded into doing anything stupid.
2 comments:
like it!
why people dont understand....
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