It wasn’t clear what the future of US carbon emissions would look like in 2013. After several decades of steady growth, they dropped precipitously following the 2008 economic crisis, then stabilized with a few ups and downs during a few years of tepid economic growth. It was unclear whether the previous relationship between growth and emissions would reassert itself.
I decided to look for myself. When you graph the data, it’s clear that 2008 created an inflection point; since then, carbon emissions have trended downward despite year-to-year variability. That has not come at the cost of economic growth—outside of the pandemic, that has remained steady. Since economic growth resumed following the 2008 crisis, it has been accompanied by slowly declining carbon emissions.
There are plenty of reasons to remain pessimistic. Even if emissions are trending downward, they’re not falling fast enough to help us avoid some of the worst impacts of climate change. Data centers are booming and often come with their own fleets of fossil fuel generators. The Trump administration is overtly hostile to renewable energy.
All that aside, the last decade-plus clearly indicates that the US can continue growing without rising carbon emissions. Even if emissions rise over the next few years, we can know it isn’t because it was necessary for economic growth. We used World Bank data for US GDP. Carbon emissions data comes from the University of Exeter’s Global Carbon Project.
Source: Ars Technica · Summarized by HeadlinesBriefing