America’s Carbon Emissions Fell for the First Time Since Covid
Robinson Meyer from HeatMap writes that “We’re back to emitting like it’s 1991 – even with a bigger economy.”
The first time since the beginning of the pandemic both America’s economy and carbon emissions moved in the right direction. America’s greenhouse gas pollution from energy and industrial activities fell by 1.9% in 2023 compared to the year before. It’s the first time in this decade that the U.S. has hit the mark of growing its economy and cutting its climate pollution at the same time.
The Rhodium Group reports how America’s greenhouse gas emissions changed last year, when the fuel economy of new cars hit an all-time high and the Biden administration’s climate law began to go into effect. Here are five takeaways from the report:
The American economy is becoming less carbon intensive – and the rate of change is accelerating.
America’s carbon emissions peaks in 2005. Since then, the economy has kept growing, but climate pollution has slowly fallen. Last year, America emitted as much carbon as it did in 1991, when the economy was roughly a quarter of its current size.
The power grid is driving most of those emissions reductions.
Last year, climate pollution from the power sector fell by 8%, a greater decline than in any other part of the economy.
That’s because, in part, the coal industry is dying. Coal continues to decline as the economics of natural gas, wind, and solar drive it off the grid. The U.S. installed a record amount of solar in 2023 and also opened the first new nuclear reactor in decades.
A warm winter also helped
About 10% of America’s greenhouse gas emissions are produced by buildings, which means furnaces in homes and offices. The majority of American residential and commercial buildings are heated with fossil fuels.
Because of climate change, 2023 was the warmest year measured, with an especially mild winter. So Americans burnt less oil, propane, and gas to keep warm.
Transportation and industrial emissions are still problems
Carbon pollution levels rose slightly, driven not by cars and trucks, but by air travel, which depends on fossil fuels.
The industrial sector - such as heavy industries, such as stell, cement, mining and chemicals, also increased its emissions last year. Engineers are still working on figuring out how to manage many of the carbon-intensive industrial activites without releasing greenhouse gases into the atmosphere.
The industrial sector also include the fossil-fuel industry, and last year America’s oil and gas production reached an all-time high. Oil and natural gas emit pollution not just when they are burned, but also when they are extracted from the ground.
Leaking, flaring, and venting natural gas, which mostly consists of methane, a greenhouse gas 20 times stronger than carbon dioxide continues to be a source of pollution.
The U.S. remains off its Paris Agreement track
President Biden has pledged that the U.S. will cuts emissions in half, but with six years left to meet that deadline, emissions are only 17.2% below their high. That means America must triple its pace of pollution reductions, cutthing them by 6.9% each year to meet this goal.
As carbon pollution is likely to drop in the next few years, as the Inflation Reduction Act and new Environmental Protection Agency rules kick in, emission cuts of that magnitude are probably unrealistic. But, no other countries are on track to meet their Paris Agreements as well.