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9:42 am, November 17th, 2025 - 3 comments
Categories: China, climate change, Environment, Europe, science, us politics -
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The world’s largest economies are lowering or flatlining emissions at the same time as they are growing their economies.
Let’s start with China. In 1980 China was less than 5% of the world’s GDP and now accounts for 20% of it and rising. After the first three quarters of the year, China’s C02 emissions are now finely balanced between a small decrease or rise, depending on what happens when they measure the last quarter. A drop in the full-year total became more likely after September, which recorded an approximately 3% drop in emissions year on year. This is helped by a rapid decarbonisation of their entire transport sector with electric vehicle sales already at 50% of the market and rising, and a rapid turn towards toward renewable electricity generation.
Yes, a billion people can see the broad-scale benefits of sustained economic growth and can also decarbonise their economy at the same time.
Fossil fuel emissions from the United States of America have been declining since 2005.Sure they are the most wasteful country on earth, but they are now on the right trajectory.
What about Australia? So easy to think of them as just a great big mining and gas behemoth with a real estate economy tacked on. And yet. Emissions in the year to March 2025 were 28.1% below June 2005 levels (the base year for Australia’s 43% reduction by 2030 target under the Paris Agreement.
And New Zealand is too, with no help from this government.
In India, GDP growth has outpaced CO2 emissions growth by over 50%. They are a huge proportion of world CO2 production now, but India too is flatlining it. An important sign this year is that India’s power sector CO2 production fell this year for the first time in half a century. Essential to this result is the flatlining of coal use for energy production.
Analysis: India’s power-sector CO2 falls for only second time in half a century – Carbon Brief
This rapid CO2 flatlining will only improve as India’s electric vehicle fleet heads from 8% to 10% from now through to 2030.
China and India along with advanced economies account for over 80% of global GDP and nearly 70% of energy demand.
Other emerging and developing economies, such as those in Africa, Eurasia and Latin America, have also seen divergent trends of economic activity and emissions.
The entire European Union is decreasing greenhouse gas emissions.
In fact there are 35 countries that have consistently managed to decouple CO2 emissions from economic growth, lowering the former while continuing their GDP-measured prosperity. It can be done and is being done.
Across the world, fossil fuel emissions are still increasing and are yet to reach a peak.
But what the largest economies in the world are achieving is the most ambitious policy programme since the end of the Great Depression nearly a century ago: to sustain economic growth for their overall prosperity and their public tax base, while at the same time decreasing total CO2 emissions.
We all need to stake stock here and not be locked into the standard Left Melancholy doom loop.
We are doing it. The state remains the most powerful actor in making this happen. And it is working. The state is also successfully leading the private sector to decarbonise while sustaining GDP that enables tax base growth and broadscale prosperity to continue, in all areas of the world other than South East Asia and the Middle East.
It is most certainly worth celebrating those who are achieving sustained prosperity and lowering CO2 emissions simultaneously.
States are successfully working to ensure that a new and better world is indeed possible.
So thumbs up for statism!
At what point does a Green zealot yield to pragmatism? Well, for me personally your framing seems an effective enabler. To the extent that it proves progress being made whilst the status quo remains mostly toxic, folks can concede the technical point without losing their mental grasp of strategic goals.
Inasmuch as the state is the midwife of traditional exploition strategies, supporters of statism seem like the ancient dude always pushing shit up-hill (Sisyphus?), so I guess voters will self-identity with wannabe shit-pushers or not, depending how much they've learnt from experience about users of the technique. The state only ever retains viability due to inertia (constitutional law) and statism advocates have been thin on the ground during recent decades. The King, as head of state, could use his Green street cred to set a better example of how to use monarchy as tool for social improvement.
I don’t know who’s winning. But I do know who’s losing, the planet, and who’s actively making things worse: our own government.
And yes, it’s encouraging to see China and other emerging economies cutting emissions. But climate politics gets a lot easier when you don’t have to build democratic consent.
Or when your government can deal with opposition by bribing it, arresting it, or making it disappear.
We certainly are. Respect for GDP growth knows no bounds – let's celebrate the ‘win’.
Buy new smart-things, take a holiday, or simply enjoy some fine dining – and, crucially, keep believing everything's gonna be just fine on spaceship Earth. I have to believe I'll be decomposing before overshoot shit really hits the fan – future generations be damned.
Don't like the sound of "accelerating the burn rate" – for god's sake slow down.