Does the USA need to do anything?
So let’s say we agree with the 1000s of scientists, and respected leaders like Bill Gates etc, that this is a global problem, needing urgent action. Why should the USA in particular be the one that needs to take action? Certainly if you read this 2018 paper from Energy in Depth, which argues (quite correctly) that a move to natural gas has allowed the US to reduce emissions whilst sustaining growth, you would think that the USA is leading the way on CO2 reduction. Some quotes:
Incredibly, the United States leads all major nations in carbon reductions this century
… fracking has allowed the United States to lead the world in greenhouse gas reductions while sustaining economic growth
So, the problem clearly lies with the rest of the world, not us! Energy in Depth (EID) [1] is a research and public outreach campaign of the Independent Petroleum Association of America - so let’s examine their claims.
The chart below conveys their central point - reduced CO2 emissions, but continued growth, and it’s due to the growth in natural gas consumption.
I’ll forgive them the classic use of non-zero axis combined with emotive language e.g. the use of the term “plummet” to describe a 14% decrease in 12 years , “soar” to describe an increase of 20% (it looks like more than a 14% decrease from the chart, but their chart is wrong, as we will see). If I struggled with golf over the same 12 year time span, with the only improvement in my game going from 18 over par to 15 over, I would expect few compliments on my “plummeting” handicap, and I would be surprised to hear someone getting a 1.5% wage increase each year boasting of their “soaring” salary. I’ll even forgive EID for the fact that their chart doesn’t even correctly plot the data that they say it is based on (though that is a particularly brazen way to try to mislead everyone!). So first let’s go and fix that - the emission data this was based on, that was actually listed in the EID report, was the US Energy Information Administration (EIA) Monthly Review (June 2018) [2] . Then let’s plot the emission data, though actually ensuring we do it to represent the true numbers (I’m old fashioned that way), and avoid the emotive words:
So the corrected chart shows that the emissions were not up that far above 6000 at the start of the period, and there isn’t an accelerating drop at the end of it.
What is not forgivable is their attempt to mislead the public by the classic tricks of:
- Carefully selecting data points and time periods to look good.
- Making meaningless comparisons - it means little to compare the absolute reductions of the US with other countries of a much smaller size, and not talk about how USA emissions compare with countries (or groups of countries like Europe), of similar size and level of development.
Starting with the data selection: why pick the start point of 2005 to show USA action? Given that the known threat of climate change was sufficiently high that the IPCC was formed in 1988, and Bush’s USGCRP (the folks who produce the National Climate Assessment Reports) was established in 1990, I think 1990 would make a much more reasonable start point to show the US leadership. So, extending back to 1990, and updating the data with those in the latest EIA Monthly Review (Nov 2019) [3] , we get the following:
Even if the paper was focusing on this century, omitting the whole period of increasing emissions 2000-2005 is misleading.
But how does this compare with other countries, given the claim we are “leading the way”?
The EIA Monthly Review includes data of the US only, so we will instead look to the data from EDGAR (the EU’s Emission Database for Global Atmospheric Research [4]), which is the same source as used in Wikipedia. [5] (As the EID paper later used data from BP to compare the US to other countries, we could instead have used the same instead of EDGAR. The figures from EDGAR match those from EIA, whilst the BP emission figures are slightly lower across the board - however, they tell a similar story. So I stuck with EDGAR here, though later we will use BP data as well. EDGAR contains data for years 1990, 2000, 2005, 2010, 2015, 2017, 2018 only, hence is ‘smoother’ than the chart above.)
Adding the EU to the chart, we can compare the US with a group of similarly developed countries, with a comparable population.
So, the EU, with a population of 510 M, about 1.5 times that of the US, already had lower emissions in 1990, and since then has reduced emissions by more than 20% whilst the US has increased emissions. Some leadership.
The EID paper paper also included the following snarky comment, clearly intending to undermine both moves to renewable energy and regulations reigning in the fossil fuel industry.
The United States decreased carbon emissions 42 million tons from 2016 levels in 2017 — more than any other country — while renewable- and regulation-happy Europe collectively saw emissions increase 92 million tons, including year-over-year emission increases in Germany and France
Selective choice of 2016-2017 of course doesn’t reflect the long term trend that we just looked at - and unfortunately the USA put all that weight (and more) back on again in 2018 with an increase of 131 Mton, whilst by contrast Europe resumed its long term downward trend. The countries selectively called out - Germany & France - both reduced emissions again in 2018, and other Western countries like the Netherlands and UK decreased emissions consistently in the period 2015-2018. The tables below show this:
So perhaps renewables and regulations are the way to go.
I should stress, the EID was the first paper I read coming from the Oil and Gas lobby. I imagine it’s typical - using highly selective and misrepresentative information to argue against any action.
Hence the two main arguments for why the USA must be engaged along with other countries is that:
- The USA is the second largest contributor to annual emissions worldwide, having fairly recently been overtaken by China. With 14% of world emissions and growing, the world simply can’t meet its goals without US reductions. Also, the growth of China has been relatively recent, making the US the leading source of the total CO2 emissions over time.
- The USA, along with its North American cousin, uses by far the most CO2 per person - more than twice the EU, and more than 3 times the worldwide average.
We have to join the EU in showing leadership that a developed economy need not emit CO2 at our current level. The consequence of other countries emitting at the same per capita rate by 2030 would be a disaster, and the US continuing at its current level would obviously undermine the resolve of countries with fast developing economies to address their growing problem. The chart below shows the disastrous total global CO2 emissions if other countries moved to the same per capita emissions as the US
Certainly the public in European countries became concerned earlier than in the US e.g. a 2010 paper from the Pew Research Center showed in the USA, 19% were very concerned, compared to an average of 38% across the four EU countries polled [6]. During my frequent visits to the UK, it is obvious that individuals are much more conscious of climate change impacts in day-to-day choices. We can see some impact of that in the cars people drive, where the average mpg of new cars bought in 2006 was 46 mpg in the UK, nearly twice that of the 24.7 mpg in the US (even accounting for different size of gallons) [7] [8] [9] . That means ½ the emissions per person.
As well as the moral obligation to act, there is the benefit of moving faster, so that it’s US companies leading the way in new energy technologies like solar, wind, and CO2-negative biomass power plants.