Can the economy still grow with a decrease in greenhouse gas emissions? For centuries, the U.S. economy and economies around the world have grown steadily, but so have greenhouse gas emissions. While the economy occasionally drops, greenhouse gas emissions generally have not. Now that carbon levels are way past the environmental capacity a change has to happen in order for future generations to live healthily in a world with nature. For a while, the question has been: can a decrease in greenhouse gasses and an increase in the economy coexist? But what we really should be asking is can climate stabilization actually drive economic growth?
It wasn’t until roughly 2009 when GHG emissions in the U.S. began to decline. This is largely due to President Obama’s Climate Action Plan, reducing GHG emissions by 17% of the 2005 level by 2020 if other countries agreed to reduce emissions as well. There was a lot of backlash and doubt about what the state of the economy would be like when reducing emissions but clearly, it had been working and the economy has thrived since then.
The Clean Power Plan concept, drawn up by the U.S. Energy Information Administration, project a continued growth in GDP with reduction of emissions in coming years. The plan will actually boost the industry of power’s revenue. By 2020 the Clean Power Plan will show a .78% increase of $/MBTU (dollars per million British thermal units, used to measure energy of natural gas) over the current course.
This reduction in GHG emissions and rise in GDP is referred to as decoupling. 20 countries, including the United States, experienced this decoupling from 2000-2014 proving that it has potential to prevail everywhere. Projections of the Clean Power Plan will further boost this decoupling. They project that, with the CPP, between 2020 and 2025 Carbon Dioxide emissions from U.S. energy will drop by 6% while GDP will rise 13%.
