A Decline In 2015 Emissions?

A new analysis in Nature Climate Change finds that global CO2 emissions may have declined by 0.6% in 2015. This text is from Nature's news report on the finding.

Researchers at the University of East Anglia, UK, and the Global Carbon Project found that carbon emissions could decline by 0.6% in 2015, a departure from a decade of growing 2.4% per year. The research, published in Nature Climate Change, attributes the decline to a reduction in China’s coal consumption as its economy slows and it moves to cleaner, renewable energy sources.

... The results are in line with a pair of analyses released earlier this year by the Netherlands Environmental Assessment Agency and the International Energy Agency, which show the rate of global emissions growth slowing significantly in 2014.

... US President Barack Obama emphasized this new trend in a 30 November speech in paris, saying that it has “broken the old arguments for inaction”. “We have proved that strong economic growth and a safer environment no longer have to conflict with one another.

I will skip the usual uncertainties about China's coal consumption in 2015. You can read the news report linked-in above to get the details. I am more interested in Obama's decoupling claim—"we have proved that strong economic growth and a safer environment no longer have to conflict with one another."

The money quote comes from the NPR report on the possible emissions decline.

Climate scientist Rob Jackson from Stanford University says it's a small dip — less than 1 percent. Still, even that amount is significant. As economies surge they usually use more energy, Jackson says, which means they put out more CO₂.

But that's not what happened this year.

"I was surprised by the result," he says. "Previously we've only seen this sort of thing when global economies were in crisis. That's the most exciting piece of this puzzle: We're seeing a flattening or decline in emissions at a time when the global economy is still growing robustly."

The key word here is robustly. Is the global economy growing robustly?

You people know how much I hate raining on this kind of parade, but I am forced (compelled, obliged, etc.) to quote a new analysis of the global economy which appeared recently at the CEPR policy portal, which features research-based policy analysis and commentary from leading EU economists (hat tip, Tim Iacono).

Presenting the October 2015 IMF World Economic Outlook, Maurice Obstfeld (2015) identified the fall of commodity prices as one of the powerful forces shaping the outlook for the world economy. The strength of this force, however, is underestimated by the official forecasts in the IMF’s flagship publication.

As illustrated in Figure 1 the IMF world economic outlook database reports  a reduction of Gross Planet Product (GPP)  for the year 2015 by -3,8 trillion dollar (-4.9%). A nominal reduction of GPP of this size has occurred only once since 1980 (the starting year of the IMF database), namely at the start of the Great Recession when GPP contracted by -5.3%.

Table 1 illustrates that all previous contractions of nominal GPP are associated with major crises in the world economy.

Figure 1. Gross Planet Product at current prices (trillions of dollars, 1980 – 2015). Source: IMF World Economic Outlook Database, October 2015

Table 1. Years with nominal contractions of GPP (1980-2015). Same source as above

You see, then, that the global economy in GPP terms is shrinking according to IMF data.

Shrinking does not equal growing robustly. And it's not shrinking only a little bit. Based on data since 1980, it is shrinking a lot (Table 1).

One might think this would be Front Page News.

And if the global economy is contracting in 2015, it would not be surprising for global CO2 emissions to be falling at the same time.

So much for Obama's decoupling claim and Stanford climate scientist Rob Jackson's exciting finding.

Truly, bullshit is everywhere.

Comments

[Ken Barrows]

One can look at EIA's Weekly Petroleum Report (WPR) on Wednesday morning to see the above is bullshit. Maybe Flatlanders will say that the WPR is bullshit!