Sarcasm Alert
As all of you faithful DOTE readers know, I lay awake at night worrying about global warming. Will humanity respond in time? Oh, the suffering! Oh, the agony!
But I am greatly relieved now that I've read Dave Roberts' Will California redouble its push for clean energy? It all rides on this upcoming vote. Well, OK, I didn't actually read it. In fact, I didn't get past the first paragraph and this graph.
It's difficult to overstate how important California is to the US clean energy effort. For decades it has been serving as a kind of existence proof, growing its economy even as per-capita energy use and carbon intensity have fallen.
GHG = greenhouse gases
What do we care about? We care about total annual GHG emissions (red line). That's what drives climate change. And what does the chart show? It shows very minor negative per cent changes in GHG emissions with respect to the year 2000 baseline in the period 2009-20013, a reduction which was almost entirely driven by the severe 2008-09 recession and its aftereffects.
On the other hand what do GHG emissions per capita (orange line) or per dollar of GDP (yellow line) tell us?
Nothing important. The population (blue line) and economy (green line) continue to grow, despite that recent big decline in GDP in 2008-09. California's humans (including its new ones) are still emitting GHGs one way or the other. The result? Nothing much with respect to the year 2000 baseline.
The fact that Californians are emitting less than they used to on a per-capita or per GDP basis is meaningless horseshit unless total annual GHG emissions show a correspondingly significant decline. And they don't.
When emissions were growing (per cent change) from 2001 to 2008, the economy (GDP) drove the change. After the crash? GDP drove the trend the other way through 2011.
And I'll let you in on a little secret: those declining per capital and per GDP trends after 2009 are really telling us that a lot of Californians are a lot poorer than they were at the top of the housing bubble in 2006-07.
We might try limiting population and economic growth to reduce GHG emissions, but those subjects can not be discussed by Dave Roberts or anyone else in Flatland. Yes, California is an "existence proof" of something (Roberts' phrase).
It's an existence proof that it's Planet Stupid we're living on.
Yes, and much of that increased GDP is no doubt used to buy more manufactured goods from China, where we know they make lots more of stuff without polluting more ...
Posted by: T e Cho | 09/01/2015 at 10:34 PM