Greenhouse Emissions Drop Less During Economic Downturn Than Expected 87
An anonymous reader writes with a quick bite from Nature World News: "The contribution of economic decline in reducing greenhouse gas emissions is very low, reveals a new study. Researcher Richard York of the University of Oregon studied data collected between 1960 and 2008 from more than 150 nations in order to analyze the impact of economic decline on greenhouse gas emissions."
From the paper: "In Model 2, the percentage of the population living in urban areas and the percentage of GDP from the manufacturing sector were included as control variables. This model has lower data coverage than Model 1 (154 versus 160 nations, and 4,134 versus 5,630 nation-year observations) owing to missing data on the control variables. The coefficients, at 0.752 for growth and 0.346 for decline, are similar to those from Model 1 and, as in Model 1, are both significantly different from 0 and significantly different from each other."
my guess (Score:3, Insightful)
Re:my guess (Score:5, Insightful)
My guess is, that the effects of the recent economic downturn has yet to be realised - it's been kicked down the road by the creation of trillions of dollars and increased debt to offset its effect - it's been absorbed (hidden) by more debt and inflation.
So I think it's a little too early to be making any judgements or conclusions.
Re: (Score:2, Interesting)
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You may be right. I wonder if our economy is being crippled on purpose to force us to lower carbon emissions. I bet it looks that way to the coal industry.
You give far too much credit for US leadership and their ability for long term planning. (or perhaps its the populations fault with the attention span of a.... LOOK, A SQUIRREL, for letting these people in the wheel in the first place) I mean, you guys started 2 wars you didnt budget for and cut taxes for the rich at the same time... What exactly were you expecting to happen?
Re:The wealthy don't matter (Score:4)
Until they start asking the half of America that pays no income tax to start contributing something, or to sacrifice some services, the teensy amount they can raise by asking the one percent tthat pays the most (and receives little in return) to pay more won't even be a drip in the bucket.
Bolstering the economy by theft only goes so far.
You can't pay taxes if your income doesnt even cover food, shelter and medical care for you and your dependables but if you're making millions you wont even notice a drop in your living standards even if you paid half of your income in taxes. Taxation aside, US is also spending more on healthcare than any other country while getting worst return-per-dollar of any industrialized nation.
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The "47%" includes incomes all the way up to $50k last I heard. It's insane that they pay nothing.
If they are getting earned income tax credits or other net contributions from the feds, they should at least have to turn around and give some back under the label of Income Tax just so that they have a feeling of ownership. Even if it's just $10.
Re:The wealthy don't matter (Score:4, Informative)
Even the bottom 20% pays an average of 17.4% of their income in taxes. It is absurd for anyone to say that some group "pays nothing." It is grossly absurd for a well-educated, former governor and many supposedly informed supporters, including a member of the House Budget Committee, to say "they don't pay anything."
Here is one summary of the overall tax burden as a % of income in 2011:
17.4% - Lowest 20% (Avg cash income: $13,000)
21.2% - Second 20% ($26,100)
25.2% - Third 20% ($42,000)
28.3% - Fourth 20% ($68,700)
29.5% - Next 10% ($105,000)
20.3% - Next 5% ($147,000)
30.4% - Next 4% ($254,000)
29.0% - Top 1% ($1,371,000)
Source (pdf): http://www.ctj.org/pdf/taxday2012.pdf [ctj.org]
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Oh...that explains why my ex, who makes around $30k gets money back every year (in excess of her withholding) due to the various programs such as the earned income tax credit and child tax credit, etc. etc.
I guess the Citizens for Tax Justice forgot those small details.
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She gets money back becasue she is having them hold to much.
Getting money back doesn't mean they pay nothing, dimwit.
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"gets money back every year (in excess of her withholding) "
I'll cut you some slack because I know people usually just skim the posts.
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I find the "they-pay-nothing" argument pretty disgusting given the fact that the bulk of the working poor are probably paying a higher rate than the likes
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I didn't pay income tax for the last 10 years. I know I'm a lazy no good son of a bitch. My wife was a full-time nursing student, and I was a part-time comp sci student while holding down a full-time job and we had 4 kids. Had plenty of money to spend, didn't qualify for food stamps or govt aid, had our own health insurance, but we did qualify for earned income credit (which is a form of welfare). Just about everyone I worked with fell into the same category. We all averaged about $45k a year doing ma
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Maybe you should stop guessing and look up the numbers. Cause you look like an idiot.
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I'm sorry...EVERYONE should have to pay into federal taxation...to have some 'skin in the game' so to speak.
Everyone could
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Everyone who has a job pays FICA taxes. A substantial number of people who pay not federal taxes are retired with (almost) no income other than their SS payments.
If you say that no one should get back more money than they put it then you're probably talking about increasing the welfare departments because the Earned Income Tax Credit is in some ways a substitute for welfare for people with children they are responsible for. It's probably a cheaper way to do it than explicitly giving them welfare too.
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And no, I don't think you should get tax credits for kids...why? You get a credit for fucking? It isn't like people will stop fucking and reproducing just because there is no longer a tax credit for it.
Besides, that's unfair for those with few or no kids as that they basically are subsidizing YOUR reproduction, you know?
Stop giving welfare. I don't mind a safety net...if you're infirmed, or elderly...fine. If it is temporary...lose job, etc
but you are so wrong (Score:2)
Every dollar you and all your 300 million americans pay in income tax (federal) goes directly to pay back debt, ie it goes directly to the BANKS.
So if the govt had zero debt, they wouldnt need your income tax.
Get a clue, income tax was only invented to pay for the war, the WW1 WW2 is OVER.
Give us our fucking money, govt theives.
The Big Lie Lives [Re:The wealthy don't matter] (Score:3)
This - from the Economist http://www.economist.com/node/21563343 [economist.com] :
Only 8% of households pay no federal tax at all...
For the more numerate among you: a progressive income tax + a lot of poor people = many people paying little or no income tax. They still pay all sorts of other taxes.
Also, what proportion of serving members of our armed forces come from families in the "47%" - do you think it's proportional to the population as a whole or perhaps the poor are hugely over-represented here?
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Most of the people who pay no federal income tax are still paying FICA tax if they are working. Any they also pay sales taxes and various other state taxes. Another substantial chunk of them are retired and receive so little income they pay no federal income tax. Surprisingly it includes around 160,000 people who are in the top 10% of earners. I Googled "who are the 47% not paying taxes" and found a number of articles. Here is one of them. [dailyfinance.com]
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You may be right. I wonder if our economy is being crippled on purpose to force us to lower carbon emissions. I bet it looks that way to the coal industry.
Nah, this is the U.S., under bribe-and-trade, the Coal Industry just isn't buying enough lobbying offsets to counter hot-air lobbying emissions produced by the Natural Gas Industry.
Debt, - no free money :) (Score:2)
My guess is, that the effects of the recent economic downturn has yet to be realised - it's been kicked down the road by the creation of trillions of dollars and increased debt to offset its effect
Seriously, don't worry about debt, it's all hype, nothing to worry about... When wheels start spinning again, and you're not paying for two wars, that debt will be gone in no time...
Keep in mind that interest rates are so low, that take loans and investing it in education, research, infrastructure, etc. is very likely to pay of, big time. With a much bigger interest than you're charged for borrowing the money (which is practically free today).
Anyways, just my two cents... Keep in mind that when the state
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Now we have a republican rising in the poles. I don't want to support Obama... he continued the warrant-less wiretapping of US citizens, he executes people without trial. (probably ones that deserve it but still, nobody should have that power) But... he hasn't dragged us into any more wars. He has been very slow to pull us out of Bush's wars and he has dropped some bombs to support a revolution (resulting in a rise for the Islamic Brotherhood ans Sharia law, yay... that reall
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" he executes people without trial. "
you know who else executes without a trial? A police officer that kills someone in the line of duty. Don't fall into the" OMG! the president kills citizen whenever he wants" scaremonger poised by For et. al.
There was a huge legal issue leading up to that.
If you are helping the enemy and hiding with the enemy, then you will die with the enemy. They wanted to capture him, but that wasn't feasible.
". He has been very slow to pull us out of Bush's wars "
I disagree. I think i
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This is not the same thing as gathering a group of like-minded people who you chose yourself in a room 1/2 way around the planet and deciding who lives and who dies and then classifying the information so that no body can ever verify what/why they did it, forever.
I'm not even makin
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I had a kid. Are the rest of you doing your duty in making a future generation to pass the buck onto?
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I don't know anybody who isn't scared to one degree or another about what's going on in the economy. I know a LOT of folks who don't drive as much, who don't buy as much, etc....and all of those will slightly reduce emission of so-called 'greenhouse gases'. The financial mess we've kicked down the road to our grandchildren is horrific.
An unscientific and unproven t
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"so-called 'greenhouse gases
they are greenhouse gases, no 'so-called green house gases.
The economy hasn't change any of my habits at all. It's not really as bad as people think. I remember the 80s. Try finding a job in 1982. I mean, almost every place had 'DO not apply here' signs in their windows.
"An unscientific and unproven theory really isn't something that should be guiding people's actions anyway"
um,. it is proven. Do you even know the 'scientific theory' even means?
" what might happen, maybe, someday
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My guess is, that despite the cut in GDP, and the long, painful period of high unemployment, the economy hasn't actually been that bad. And that most of us have not had to change our habits much to cope.
"Despite of millions of people losing their homes and livelyhoods, it hasn't been that bad cause I still have mine."
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Or possibly it is taking more and more energy simply to maintain the current level of GDP.
That means big trouble ahead.
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Your guess is wrong (and by the way, GDP is 70% consumption of mostly foreign goods).
GDP is, by definition, equal to consumption of domestically produced goods, plus government spending, plus investment, plus exports, minus imports. 70% of GDP could very well be consumption, at least in countries with unusually low government spending, but perhaps you could explain how it could be mostly of foreign goods? Consuming foreign goods reduces GDP. It doesn't increase it. GDP is a production measure, not a consumption one. It's quite possible to have your population living in poverty despite enorm
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By the way, you are missing part of the formula for GDP, it's the deflator that they are supposed to apply to discount inflation. Of-course their deflators are ridiculously low, I have an 'informative' post with many numbers and links in it here [slashdot.org], which shows a few things about inflation and GDP.
The GDP deflater is not part of the calculation of a given years GDP expressed in that years price level. It's only used if you need to express it in another year's price level, as is necessary for calculating growth.
AFAIC GDP has been shrinking for a long time now in 2 ways.
1. The 'production' part of GDP is shrinking all the time. Look at the trade deficit numbers, here is a page with history on it in PDF or text [census.gov]. For the year 2011 the trade deficit was 559Billion dollars and it's growing all he time. Of-course the total personal consumption in USA is mostly on services, not on goods, in fact 2/3 of all consumption is services and only 1/3 is goods. 11Trillion was spent by US consumers in 2011, so about 3 Trillion was spent on goods and the rest was energy, food and services (like healthcare and education for example), so in that sense US consumer consumes mostly 'US' service. However if you look at the goods (go to Walmart and compare how many things are made in USA vs foreign made, like China), you'll find that most of the goods bought and sold (and even food, 90% of sea food comes from Asia) is made elsewhere.
All of GDP is the 'production' part. It's a measure of production within a given geographical area. If US consumers spend, say, $1tr more on imports then that makes no difference to the GDP figure. Remember: GDP=c+g+i+x-m.....adding $1tr to c (consumption) and $1tr to m (imports) leaves it unc
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World oil sales month 2 month
http://1.bp.blogspot.com/-vgnxa_JCLkU/Ti4TxYIppMI/AAAAAAAAAdw/rLpNUkhusNg/s1600/FIGURE209.GIF [blogspot.com]
If you burn 89 million barrels of oil per day, thats got to be the majority of pollution.
If that changes year to year, then the co2 levels must follow it.
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Assuming no change in coal and diesel(ships mostly) usage, globally.
Re:my guess (Score:4, Insightful)
however there will be more CO2 produced as people go back to heating with coal and heavy oils, so it may be a wash.
You have really nailed it with that last part. I would not be so quick to blame coal for carbon emissions though (another discussion). The truth is poverty not affluence leads to environmental crisis. Affluence is why the USA has more forest now than it did 100 years ago. Affluence brings choice and when people have choice they do choose to protect the world around them.
I think we don't see the drop in emissions we might expect because even though the total ecnomic activity is decreased or at least the rate of growth is, the improvements and investments in clean technology are not being made. If I am a manufacturing business doing well, maybe I upgrade to new higher efficiency ovens; on the hope that the fuel savings will make me more profitable in the future and if nothing else less exhaust gases will be better for me, my employees and my family today. If I am struggling I am going to keep what I got, conserve capital and try to get through the hard times.
Autos are a good data point. By some estimates we have as many as 9 times the number of cars on the road in the USA today as we did in 1970, yet the total pollution from all those cars is about the same. There we a number of boom years in there were people bought new more efficient cleaner cars. During the big dip orders for autos fell to lows not seen in decades, as people kept their aging fleets.
Poverty is what forces people into destroying the environment, that is why you see a deforested Hatti, that is why you see so much disease in parts of India and China, they haven't the affluence to treat waste water.
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" The truth is poverty not affluence leads to environmental crisis."
Stupid. really really stupid. the Affluence gain off people in poverty. The effluent buy expensive things that take a lot of pollution to make and run.
It's not as simple as you make it seem.
" Affluence is why the USA has more forest now than it did 100 years ago."
no, environmental movement did that. BTW it's trees not forests. Yes, there are more forests, but it is't not just forest, it's green belts , parks, as well.
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Ask yourself how much would traction would the environmental movement have received if you had to convince people barely making enough to get by to support those higher costs? Answer none. The environment movement exists precisely because people are/were affluent enough to try and clean up and live more cleanly.
You don't see people in impoverished nations stopping the use of wood as a primary heating and cooking fuel. They just walk farther as the forest retreats. The are not stupid either they know the
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my guess is its all to do with beans (Score:5, Funny)
(well its as good as any other theory I've read)
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That reminds me. I haven't seen Blazing Saddles in a while. I need to queue that up for a viewing.
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Yeah, just the increase in prices for everything, wind back to 2001, and the after tax money thats left over, after bills, and housing, we used to have $700 more per month compared to now, so we are $8400 worse off per year.
Theres only so much penny pinching and cutting back that can be done, can't live on rice and water like a prisoner, just to break even to 2001.
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Theres only so much penny pinching and cutting back that can be done,
And you haven't come anywhere close to the limit.
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gosh, you had more money at the end of a boom period? I'm shocked I tell you, shocked. What if you want back to 2004? Do you have more or less.
I make less money then I did in 2001(100k+), and substantially more then I did in 2002.(60K). It's almost like a tech bubble burst or something.
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How good for you!
Ignorance is definitely bliss.
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Ignorance is definitely bliss.
No, it's not. But in this case I'm right. Read the article, troll.
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I'd go on and guess "the economy" can't correlate meaningfully with CO2 emissions at all. I'd go for the energy consumption in civil transport and industrial systems.
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I'd go for the energy consumption in civil transport and industrial systems.
This is correlated to the economy.
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My guess is, that despite the cut in GDP, and the long, painful period of high unemployment, the economy hasn't actually been that bad. And that most of us have not had to change our habits much to cope.
My guess is, that despite there being links to both the full journal article and to a lay summary right in the Slashdot blurb, you didn't bother to read either one. And that you instead preferred to offer us all your enlightened wisdom derived from your gut feelings instead of, you know, talking about real data.
I know, I know. This is Slashdot; reading articles is for newbs....
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Paraphrased (Score:3)
No surprise (Score:4, Insightful)
Apart from people generally not changing their habits during a recession, there is the fact that the recession itself didn't hit all countries with the same intensity. Some (e.g. China, India and South Korea) are still doing well, and as a consequence, their greenhouse emissions haven''t decreased much.
While the developed countries did diminish their total emissions (e,g, UK, Japan, US, Germany), there is still the fact that the manufacturing sector ha been mostly transferred (outsourced or lost to) to the developing markets.Not surprising that the overall emissions have not dropped, at least in the same proportions that it increased during economic expansion.
150 nations + not all going in the same direction. Do the math.
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150 nations + not all going in the same direction. Do the math.
Read the article. They did the math.
They go on explaining why a booming economy and a declining economy have such different rate changes -- based on an exam
Population, GDP Accumulated Growth, Continued (Score:4, Informative)
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Well with the global warming, it was a hotter than normal summer, so people would have used the AC more
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Or: The one thing we don't sacrifice in an economic downturn are simple home comforts like warmth / cooling, but instead install poxy energy-saving lightbulbs that contribute next to NOTHING towards energy savings as a whole.
Nobody realises how to save energy properly and/or doesn't understand that their kettle pulls more power in the 2 minutes it's on than the lightbulb does all day long.
Or maybe we did cut back on energy use and those emissions came from somewhere else (e.g. people burning wood instead o
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"We all know people who are suffering terribly due to the economic crises."
I can't actually name a person who I personally know who has been affected by the economic crisis, on average, more than would have happened by chance anyway. I can name someone who lost their job and was offered a replacement - but they worked in libraries that have been scheduled to close for decades, and they moved 400 miles in between jobs to a very rural area, so their present situation is more related to that.
I have Italian fr
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The "economic crisis" was nothing more than a short-lived blip
I know many people who are out of work and can't find any. Some of them went to live on other people's property. Now instead of work, their facebook status updates are about things like mending fences and repairing barns. They're not making any money though, so they're also full of things like "I need a ride to x on y date" and so on. The "unemployment" figures are based on the number of people recieving unemployment benefits, so your speculation about unemployment based on the official figures is fallaciou
It's a model (Score:3)
It's a model. A model is a hypothesis. The "results" are correlations and as we all know, correlation is not causation.
Meanwhile, can someone explain what this means ...
York revealed that the rate of reduction in carbon dioxide emissions was slightly more than half the rate of carbon release when the economy was booming.
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Rate presumably = speed of change.
Thus the emissions dropped more quickly than when they had risen originally.
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It's "rate of release" vs. "rate of reductions in carbon dioxide emissions." Translates to "rate of release" vs. "rate of reductions of release." The second is the first derivative of the first which is not a valid comparison.
Re:It's a model (Score:4, Insightful)
It's a model. A model is a hypothesis. The "results" are correlations and as we all know, correlation is not causation.
I agree: The only way to definitely prove that AGW causes the Earth to burn to a crisp is to actually burn the planet to a crisp via greenhouse gas emissions, with no other variables that could affect the result. With an identical control Earth except for the CO2 and methane emissions, so we know that we have isolated the right variable. And double-blinded, so the researchers' biases don't creep in. And then repeat the test under the same conditions, so we know it wasn't just a fluke.
Do you have some spare planets I can use for this test? In the meantime, I'm going to accept the correlation combined with the lab-tested mechanism for one variable of that correlation causing the other variable as the best we can muster.
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Your comment is Off Topic. This discussion is about rates of CO2 emissions. It is not about AGW or AGW models.
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This is actually the important implication of this paper: emissions go up during a boom but fall less than they went up during a following slump. The author postulates that booms bring more infrastructure that remains in use subsequently.
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"correlation is not causation."
WRONG, DUMB ASS.
correlation does not imply causation.
It's the economists, stupid (Score:2)
My theory is that between all the hot CO2 coming out of the economists, plus the off-gassing of freshly printed money, greenhouse gases are expected to increase during a downturn.
What has GDP to do with greenhouse gases? (Score:4, Insightful)
Americans are so obsessed with the idea that cutting down CO2 emissions would also cut down the economy.
That is basically a brain dead idea.
Lets see where CO2 is coming from:
o heating of houses (coal/gas/oil)
o heating and cooling of houses (electricity)
o cars / trucks
o power plants (coal/gas/oil)
o cargo ships / diesel trains
o and everything that uses electricity, but the prime source is the plant where that electricity is produced
o industries with a huge energy hunger like steel plants / or any other factory that partly or in whole produces its own power (glass or porcelain producers, brick producers etc.)
Now we have to look what kind of industries or businesses are effected in an economic crisis and how much that does affect the energy consumed.
Do houses need less heating or cooling? Or do people change their cooling/heating habits during a crisis? Is there a significant different amount of homeless people during a crisis (wich don't power their own flat)?
Same for cars, commuting, trucks with goods etc. etc. etc.
I would say there is only a small group of industries that is affected by the crisis (look whose shares are dropping and whose are rising). And even if a factory is laying off 10% of its staff, I doubt it is directly reflected in 10% energy savings and CO2 reduction.
As far as I know the american economy is far over 70% based on services. So only the remaining 30% are industries and manufactoring etc. To reduce CO2 emissions by 15% you would need an effect/crisis that drops the 30% above significantly. I doubt a change in services (people employed, people buying a service etc.) has any noticeable effect on CO2 emissions.
And finally: no one is asking the USA to cripple their economy. We only ask to switch to more efficient machines, better insulation, more efficient means of transportation, burn less oil and build up a better grid. All those activities would create a lot of jobs and instead of having a crisis you would have a boom.
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Well, Fox news* has only fear to use as an AGW denialist organization. SO, you know point and claim it will cost jobs. Ignore that the best ways to deal with it involve getting industry here. It does hurt whomever wants to sell energy to China.
*Note: A study of fox new found that they are wrong in 93% o Scientific 'news' they spew out. And no, a little wrong. Or a misquote. GBut wildly factually wrong. Only slightly worse then the Wall Street Journal, now. I wonder what they have in common?
People don't stop driving or turn off the A/C. (Score:2)
Forget the summary; read the paper (Score:2)
Asymmetric effects of economic growth and decline on CO2 emissions (full text) [nature.com].
It appears to be open access.
US CO2 emissions dropping rapidly (Score:2)
In other news, US energy-related CO2 emissions are now at a 20 year low [aei-ideas.org].
The credit is split between cheap, fracked natural gas replacing coal and herbicide-resistant GM crops needing less plowing (and thus lower tractor fuel use).
US CO2 emissions per capita are now lower than they have been since at least 1973.
Coal usage, mostly (Score:1)
Coal has remained cheaper during most of this period, and half of all US energy use is for heating and cooling buildings, with little incentive to get new high mpg cars, since people can't afford new cars.
Here endeth the lesson.