It is a sign of the troubled times we live in that the latest bit of good news about reducing greenhouse gas emissions was the result of a much larger piece of bad news.
The Independent reports that Britain's greenhouse gas emissions fell by 8.6 percent in 2009. So says the Committee on Climate Change, an independent body which tracks Britain's progress on dealing with global warming. That was the good news.
The bad news is that the decline was due almost entirely to the economic downturn that has afflicted the global economy since 2008. And even in spite of all that, emission rates have climbed and will continue to climb, just at a much lower rate than might otherwise have been the case.
The U.S. Energy Information Administration has this to say in their Annual Energy Outlook: 2010 report:
"Key results highlighted in AEO2010 include moderate growth in energy consumption, increased use of renewables, declining reliance on imported liquid fuels, strong growth in shale gas production, and projected slow growth in energy-related carbon dioxide (CO2) emissions in the absence of new policies designed to mitigate greenhouse gas (GHG) emissions. ... In the Reference case, which assumes no explicit regulations to limit GHG emissions beyond the recent vehicle GHG standards, CO2 emissions from energy grow on average by 0.3 percent per year from 2008 to 2035, or a total of about 9 percent."
Of course within this good news lies the potential for another piece of bad news. The Committee on Climate Change warns that "Given the need for implementation of measures in preparation for the deeper emissions cuts required in future, the aim should be to outperform the first budget, and not to use this outperformance to reduce effort in the second budget."
In other words, now is not the time to declare a great victory and leave the efforts at reducing greenhouse gas emissions to the next generation. Politicians are working day and night to breathe life back into our faltering economy. And sooner or later those efforts will bear fruit.
Like the climate, economies are cyclical and go up and down. And as economic activity returns to normal, the rise in greenhouse gas emissions will accelerate. (Remember that even in these worst of times greenhouse gas emissions are still increasing.)
So rather than use statistics about declines in greenhouse gas emissions to put off what we know must be done, we should continue to press for the adoption of new technologies that reduce greenhouse gas emissions to replace older technologies that have fallen victim to these hard times. That truly would be a piece of good news to emerge from the rising tide of bad news.
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