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Greenhouse Emissions Drop Less During Economic Downturn Than Expected
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 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.
"First they came for the slanderers and i said nothing."
It turns out economic output was never a good excuse for the West's (and particularly USA's) high per-capita greenhouse gas emissions in the first place.
This is not really surprising.
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.
Simple. If the three billion poorest people go from earning $3,000 per capita per year to $6,000 per capita per year, the economy can slump and carbon increases.
Gently reply
(well its as good as any other theory I've read)
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.
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.
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.
Cost free eBook I read (by iBook/Kobo/Amazon/ObookO/Gutenberg etc.): "The Green Odyssey" by Philip Jose Farmer.
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 manual labor.
I don't have exact numbers, but I wonder how many people who pay no income tax fall into this category. I would argue about half of them. They make enough money to live "well" (all depends on you're definition of "well"), but since they don't make some magic number in income they get all their "tax" money back at the end of the year plus some.
21st Century Renaissance Man
It's unfortunate that the "they-pay-nothing" argument is made by so many, including a presidential candidate. This statement is false.
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
This - from the Economist http://www.economist.com/node/21563343 :
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?
Yes, it seems fairly systematic. When talking about the budget, they emphasize the amount of spending on Social Security and Medicare, but when talking about taxes, they shift to the percentage of income taxes paid by the top of the scale, ignoring the fact that Social Security and Medicare are funded almost entirely via payroll tax and not income tax.
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 of Mitt Romney.
She gets money back becasue she is having them hold to much.
Getting money back doesn't mean they pay nothing, dimwit.
The Kruger Dunning explains most post on