As first highlighted by World Climate Report and later by WUWT last week: Now its your electric ice maker in your fridge that’s killing the planet, meanwhile CO2 emissions fall significantly in the USA …this Financial Times story citing the same EIA report is getting some widespread press. It’s all in the headline I suppose.
U.S. Greenhouse Gases Drop to 15-Year Low
Here’s the most eye opening point. World Climate Report took the EIA data for total CO2 emissions from the USA, and graphed it against the CO2 emission data for the same period from China:
Figure 1. Annual carbon dioxide emissions from the United States (blue) and China (red), 1990-2009 (data source, EIA).
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Matthew Kennard
April 19, 2011
Greenhouse gas emissions in the US dropped to their lowest level in 15 years in 2009 as the impact of the financial crisis led to decreases in fuel and electricity consumption, according to newly published figures.
In 2009, the US saw its emissions of the six main greenhouses gases drop 6 per cent year-on-year to 6,633m metric tonnes, the lowest total since 1995. Despite that annual fall, emissions rose by more than 7.3 per cent between 1990 and 2009.
The figures, released by the Environmental Protection Agency, are likely to be seized upon by Republicans as evidence that there is no need for further regulation of carbon emissions. The GOP has embarked on a campaign in recent months to strip the EPA of its ability to regulate hydrocarbons as well as other pollutants.
A Republican-sponsored bill recently passed by the House has been viewed as a wide-ranging attack on the EPA. The proposed legislation argues that carbon dioxide was not mentioned in the Clean Air Act which gave the EPA legal authority to regulate air pollutants.
Full article here h/t to Dr. Leif Svalgaard
Also, this graph of income versus CO2 tells a powerful story.
Why are we still seeing demands from the EPA for cuts in the USA? Looks like a “Powershift” to me. Let that socialist network and NASA’s Dr. James Hansen go protest CO2 emissions in China. Dr. Hansen has some experience with being arrested in such protests, I’m sure he wouldn’t mind trying out the Chinese legal system to broaden his CV.
Just for fun, WUWT readers should post links to the FT story or the (March2011) report from the US Energy Information Administration (PDF) on the usual agenda driven climate blogs out there and see how many can tolerate it.
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It would be interesting to see a graph of the total emissions of US and China. The rise in China’s emissions appears to be greater than our reduction.
Truth. Truth. Truth. Did I mention truth? Just in case I overlooked it…Truth!
This blog must continue its good works at all costs. The institutionalized idio-lunacy that passes for ‘concern for the planet’ is killing us.
How long before one of the warmistas tries to claim that this drop is the reason why temperatures haven’t been rising for the last decade?
Somehow my post got transported. why not figure out the US CO2 emissions divided by the gross domestic product. Easiest way to cut CO2 emissions is to simply stop producing anything; including food.
All this does not matter//Obama just wants control over all.
They were right all along it is all about anthropogenic CO2…it snowed for the last three nights and has been in the twenties every morning, barely reaching high thirties in the day. It worked to cool the planet. Why didn’t we think of a strickened economy sooner, it would have saved billions in politicized research.
If Hansen protested in China he’d be making little rocks out of bigger rocks for the next 20 years….
the biggest drop looks to match the economy since Obama has been in office 🙂
Is this more evidence that CO2 levels follow, rather than lead, temperature changes (blinks innocently…)
The alarmists will likely argue that the decline was mostly due to the serious drop in the economy from the 2008 financial debacle and that we still need to take action to curtail CO2 emissions. Actually I hope they do, because it will prove what I have always maintained, which is that the only realistic way to curtail CO2 emissions is by inflicting horrendous damage on our economy and on the economy of the entire world. Although the vast majority of the world’s population is hopelessly ignorant about humanity’s role in the planetary climate, if they can be made aware of the incredible price the alarmists expect them to pay for very little protection from far distant and mostly illusory disasters the wheels may truly begin to fall off the CAGW wagon.
Give the warmist cult some time and they’ll rig the figures to make it look like C02 emissions have increased. They’ve had plenty of experience doing it with temperature data, it should be a piece of cake for them to ‘enhance’ the C02 emissions data.
A lot of American (and German etc.) jobs are now in China, where no EPA or Kyoto regulation stops them emitting as much CO2 as needed in the job; probably more as they don’t always use the most modern machinery. And the German PV and wind power boom surely drives up CO2 emissions in China as a lot of the things are produced over there. Strangely the left-green movement ignores this or, even worse, points out that we are only “exporting” our emissions and should thus emit even less CO2.
Looks like they are really bent on destroying the West. Maybe our leftist-green movements are infiltrated and paid by the Chinese. (Seriously, this is a possibility. The West German SPD, social democrats, were infiltrated by the East German Stasi. It is a kind of operations that a secretive, autocratic regime can easily do and could give them a lot of bang for the buck.)
The last time I saw carbon dioxide emission numbers for Europe, it looked like they have improved their carbon emissions by about the same amount as the US over the past couple decades. Of course, since they are in basically the same financial mess that we are, that makes sense. However, they are the ones with the great big cap and trade scheme, and we have nothing. So, I gotta ask; Has the cap and trade scheme been worth the cost so far? lololol.
The underwater government of the Maldives has managed to increase their Co2 emissions by roughly 52% since 2005. Probably all that jet travel to Copenhagen and Cancun did it.
Gary Swift says:
April 19, 2011 at 11:46 am
“The last time I saw carbon dioxide emission numbers for Europe, it looked like they have improved their carbon emissions by about the same amount as the US over the past couple decades. Of course, since they are in basically the same financial mess that we are, that makes sense. However, they are the ones with the great big cap and trade scheme, and we have nothing. So, I gotta ask; Has the cap and trade scheme been worth the cost so far? lololol.”
Gary, the Kyoto treaty was basically penned by a German Bundestag commission and exactly adapted to the German situation; it was not a coincidence that we just had to kill the old polluting (not CO2; real pollution like SO2 and soot) industries of Ex East Germany and be done with it. After that, all the government did was issue a lot of carbon permits for free for the CO2-emitting industries. To reduce CO2 emissions the number of permits has to drop but this hasn’t happened by now.
Kyoto was a ruse; the Australians and the UK and various other countries fell for it.
Douglas DC says:
April 19, 2011 at 11:27 am
If Hansen protested in China he’d be making little rocks out of bigger rocks for the next 20 years….
———————————————————————————
I suspect he’d probably try to convince them that the rocks in the past were bigger then they are now so he wouldn’t have to make them smaller manually.
Interesting that China’s CO2 curve took an abrupt upswing around 2000. In Oct of 2000, Clinton and the Republican congress signed PNTR which gave China Permanent Normalized Trade Relations. Right after that, the number of manufacturing jobs dropped in the US:
(Here’s the link to the graph
in case my attempt at posting a picture doesn’t work)
Here’s a paper from Joe Lieberman that says we lost 2.7 million manufacturing jobs to offshoring since 2000:
“We have seen this global outsourcing phenomena in the manufacturing sector where 2.7 million jobs have disappeared since 2000.”
So why did we give China PNTR? I’ve read some reasons from Republicans and they said that our companies would not be able to compete against the lower priced China imports.
Why did Clinton give China PNTR? I believe it was political payback. There were allegations in the 90’s that the communist Chinese government had given the DNC and Clinton illegal contributions. Well, if this is true (and I believe it is), then it’s obvious that PNTR was payback for those contributions.
Clinton and Gore also tried to pay the communist Chinese back with Kyoto.
Gotta love how the democrats have
ourChina’s best interest at heart…The DOE said when they released energy consumption figures showing the same drop that about one third of it was due to the recession, another third due to fuel switching due to natural gas and the final third due to other efficiencies achieved.
You can argue that they’re full of smoke, but that is what they reported. As a whole bunch (22? 26?) of old coal power plants were retired in 2009, that had a material impact.
This year’s numbers should be interesting.
I guess the obvious conclusion is that CO2 drives not only climate but also per capita income, right?
The warmists should be celebrating!!!! If only gasoline would go to $5 or $7 a gallon. Economy will drop even further along with CO2 emissions. Less driving, cost of everything will go up, and maybe unemployment will increase as well. Eventually even the Chinese CO2 will drop because there will be less consumers from the West. And the happy news in all this? No need to regulate or otherwise worry about CO2 because it will nosedive. And the polar bears will be happy. This is great news!!! /sarc
MarkW says:
April 19, 2011 at 11:14 am
How long before one of the warmistas tries to claim that this drop is the reason why temperatures haven’t been rising for the last decade?”
They can try, but they are also on record that it would take 1000 years to go back to normal.
Having waded through the eia document, there seems to be no reference to H2O as a GG, and I understood that H2O was responsible for about 95% of the theoretical “Greenhouse Effect”.
Am I missing something?
Would it be possible for someone to point me to a graph of the UK Greenhouse gas emissions? Even better if it was shown next to the plots of US and China.
We are already spending far too much on reducing our emissions and China are still increasing theirs. It seems a pointless and costly exercise to me.
But I am sure the scientists and politicians know best. /sarc
Where in the graph is the ‘china mystery blip’?
http://www.sciencemag.org/content/319/5859/37.full.pdf?sid=9aaa10fa-23d8-4af1-b836-cce55c409410
I have another graph showing it in one year and it was in WIKI and disappeared!
GDP raising 40% with emissions constant is impossible.
Cheating?
So, all this proves is that we know how to reduce CO2 emissions — eliminate roughly 9 million jobs and push the unemployment rate above 10 percent. Why would we want to that is a different question. Although, if I recall correctly, Nancy Pelosi claimed that people living on unemployment compensation would be free to pursue more creative activities! And, of course, they would be grateful to the politicians responsible for providing them with unemployment compensation.