Thursday, November 22, 2012

Guess which country lowered its carbon emissions most

Would you guess the United States of America? Yes. The USA lowered its carbon emissions the most over the past six years; that's the years since Kyoto Protocol went into effect. Blame Bush. President Bush and the US were vilified for not ratifying Kyoto. Instead we got results. [Update: Graphic added.]
But the UN is not happy with mere results; they want more talk!
Michigan Capital Confidential
Over the past six years, the United States has reduced its carbon emissions more than any other nation in the world.
Efforts to curb so-called man-made climate change had little or nothing to do with it. Government mandated "green" energy didn't cause the reductions. Neither did environmentalist pressure. And the U.S. did not go along with the Kyoto Protocol to radically cut CO2 emissions. Instead, the drop came about through market forces and technological advances, according to a report from the International Energy Agency.
Breakthroughs in how natural gas is extracted from underground shale formations were the key factors that led to the reductions, the report said. Natural gas has a low carbon footprint and is widely available in the United States. As a result, entrepreneurs are flocking to extract it from new areas.
"It's good news and good news doesn't get reported as much,” John Griffin, executive director of Associated Petroleum Industries of Michigan, said of the lack of reporting about the CO2 reductions. "The mainstream media doesn't want to report these kinds of things."
But the UN is not happy with these results; they want more talk, more meetings, more declarations.
UN climate bureaucrat-in-charge Christiana Figueres hopes Hurricane Sandy will wake up the US and get us to her meetings. Successful results only count when the ring is kissed.
Washington Examiner
Christiana Figueres, who leads the United Nations negotiations to get governments to reduce carbon emissions in the world, regards Hurricane Sandy as “yet another wake-up call” for Americans to get on board with her climate change policy.
“Yes, I certainly do think that this is yet another wake-up call,” Figueres said of Hurricane Sandy to Yale Environment 360 in an interview published by The Guardian.”I did hear President Obama say quite categorically in his acceptance speech that he is not going to have a future that is threatened by increasing warming . . . I do think that this mirrors the growing awareness in the United States. So I do think that Sandy has contributed to this. Is it the tipping point? That remains to be seen.”
Figueres also spoke if international frustration with the United States for failing to sign onto UN global warming initiatives such as the Kyoto Protocol.
“[I]f the United States does not strengthen its participation in the global climate regime under the newly re-elected president I think there will be increased frustration with the United States,” she said.

Job-killing policies such as cap-and-trade, which would limit and tax carbon emissions in the United States, died in 2010 due to the harm it would cause the economy. Figueres, though… [blah blah blah]
See also: Lowest energy-related CO2 emissions in 20 years. NY Times. The graphic on this page shows that "lowest in 20 years" means just that, comparing the first quarter in every year.
This isn't a "Sound" topic, but there is a shortage of reporting good news on the enviro scene.

Cross posted on Economic Freedom.

1 comment:

Anonymous said...

And if the Obama administration had allowed fracking on federal lands and drilling offshore, carbon reduction would have been greater! Yikes. Obama caused higher carbon dioxide emissions than Bush would have done.