Declining CO2 emissions around the world
I did some more data mining of the BP Statistical Review of World Energy 2015 related to national CO2 emissions. The results are very interesting.
The BP data breaks out 67 individual nations. Emissions have declined in 42 of them. their current emissions represent 46% of the world's total current CO2 emissions. Since their peaks, the decliners have shed a total of 20% of their emissions. This decline represents 11% of today's CO2 production.
The Eastern European countries caught in the collapse of the USSR have generally reduced their emissions the most, but Denmark, Sweden, France and Germany also had notable declines, as did much of Western Europe.
Considering the peak years of emissions - the years in which declines began - the collapse of the USSR and the world financial crisis of 2008 are clearly visible. the trends in IK, Sweden, Hungary, France, Germany, and Bulgaria are of longer duration. The UK decline of 35% since 1973 along with the declines in Hungary and Bulgaria appear to be due to long-term losses of economic activity (caveat - I haven't correlated the reductions to GDP performance yet.)
My conclusions:
It looks as though it is possible to achieve at least modest national reductions in CO2 emissions, so long as some stagnation or reduction in economic activity is recognized as the price. Will this carbon/economy relationship hold in the years to come? I think it will, more or less. Regardless of how fast (or if) renewable energy displaces fossil fuels, the more a country's economic output declines, the better their chance of reducing carbon emissions.
Edit to add: Unfortunately, since 2000 the world's total CO2 emissions have increased by 39%...
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It's merely offsetting the decline in nuclear generation. Maybe as time goes on it will reduce emissions, but so far it has not.
Your point about outsourcing is correct. That's one reason why Chinese (and therefore global) emissions continue to rise.
The only thing that is slightly encouraging about the absolute numbers is that the growth in FF electricity appears to be flattening out over the last three years. In terms of carbon per KwH we don't seem to be doing as well as we were 20 years ago, before China got into the fray.
The real question though is, with 400 ppm of CO2 already in the atmosphere, how much time to we really have left to make changes that will keep us below even a highly dangerous 2C rise? We know that Bill McFibben's 350 boat has long since sailed, and with every passing year the horizon grows darker.
First, that’s Hansen’s 350 boat.
Second, he did say that we need to minimize the duration of the overshoot (acknowledging that we would overshoot 400.)
Third, he acknowledged that 350 was probably too high itself.
Renewables alone won’t get us to 350. No way, no how. They cannot remove CO₂ from the atmosphere which is already there. We would need some way to capture and sequester it on a large scale, whether it is bio-engineered “carbon eating trees” or fusion-powered carbon-sucking vacuum cleaners.
Hansen (et al) suggested a few ways to bring the carbon levels back down. CCS was seen as pretty much of a must. CCS with biofuel could be a “net negative.” Agricultural methods (like biochar) would be another possible net negative.
In any case, there’s no way to get back down to 350 ppm without active sequestration efforts.
The point in aiming at 350, even though it is probably too high, is that since we were fast approaching 400 ppm, in order to get to 350 ppm, we would need to develop methods, which could be employed to bring the level even lower (as needed.)
Catching 300+ gigatonnes of CO2 is going to take a lot of joules. Maybe that's what we should use the remaining fossil fuels for... 