: Economic Growth and Carbon Emissions Used to Go Together. In Some Countries, That’s Changing #WorldNEWS When negotiators from almost 200 countries gather in Glasgow from Oct. 31 for the most important

Economic Growth and Carbon Emissions Used to Go Together. In Some Countries, That’s Changing #WorldNEWS
When negotiators from almost 200 countries gather in Glasgow from Oct. 31 for the most important U. N. climate summit since 2015, the priority will be agreeing on how fast each country should cut its carbon emissions in order for the world to avoid catastrophic levels of climate change. The latest U. N. analysis, published Oct. 26, found that current pledges would lead to a disastrous 2. 6°C average global increase in temperatures over the preindustrial era by 2100—well above the Paris Agreement’s target of limiting warming to 1. 5°C. And thats if they even meet those targets, which looks unlikely.
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As negotiators head into COP26, they’re trying to balance climate action with their countries’ economic interests. To understand why many feel those are in conflict—even if they shouldnt be—it helps to examine how modern life and the global economy became so tied to rising emissions. For almost 200 years starting in the late 1700s, when the widespread availability of coal powered the U. K. ’s industrial revolution, countries that got rich did it by burning fossil fuels. If economic activity worldwide was growing, so were emissions. If emissions fell, it was because something had gone wrong: the Great Depression, the Second World War, the energy crises of the 1970s, the collapse of the Soviet Union, the 2008 financial crash. An emissions chart for the last century mirrors the ups and downs of the global economy.
Read More: Here Are the Goals of the COP26 Climate Change Meetings—and Where the World Stands in Accomplishing Them
That relationship between emissions and the economy has remained true in recent years: emissions peaked in 2018 and 2019 before the pandemic caused a 6% decline. And the rebound is pushing them back to near 2019 levels. For most emerging and developing economies, which industrialized later, emissions are still rising as the economy grows—including in China and India, the world’s largest and third largest emitters.
Some question the value of using economic growth as a measure of economic success—a growing GDP doesn’t take into account the wellbeing of a country’s citizens or environment, or how equitably wealth is distributed. But it’s clear that to make the fight against climate change politically viable, we need to cut emissions without major economic implosions. Luckily, that’s very feasible.
Over the last few decades, most of the world’s developed countries, including several major emitters, and some developing countries, have seen their emissions peak and begin to fall. In 32 countries, emissions and economic growth have been “absolutely decoupled,” meaning that the economy is still growing steadily as emissions fall.