7 January 2008 - 0:24CO2 as a function of GDP

This is a combination of two talks, Hans Rosling’s second talk and Bjorn Lomborg’s talk.

There is a correlation that doesn’t get much press coverage- given the current technology in use in the world today, CO2 emissions rise as GDP rises. This is across the entire globe, over the last decade. This says that CO2 emissions become more of an issue the more wealthy and successful the world becomes unless we radically change the way we produce energy. This is shown in Hans Rosling’s data using the Gapminder tool.

This is a factor in Bjorn Lomborg’s talk, (posted previously). His economists placed global warming at the bottom of the list of problems we should solve first. This is based in part off the data showing that a small reduction in CO2 emissions would only postpone the day that most of Bangladesh and India goes under water- it won’t prevent it. The economists thus concluded that the solutions to date (such as the Kyoto treaty) would only delay the inevitable trend by a few years and are thus of little value.

His economists ignore the fact that most of the other solutions to global problems would tend to improve GDP and thus speed up global warming because CO2 emissions (with current technology) go up with GDP. So if we absolutely must solve global warming by limiting CO2 emissions then we should focus all our energy on technology to make the production of cheap, CO2 free energy a commonplace standard across the globe, because we are going to need only more energy as time goes on.

American news tends to portray global warming as a problem created by the developing world using dirty energy sources like coal. Not really. The USA creates more CO2 emissions per person than any other nation, not because we’re bad people but because we’re filthy rich. As the poor nations become less poor (China, India, I’m looking at you) they will consume more energy, driving up CO2 emissions to approach US levels.

CO2 emission is a problem of the rich nations. It is exacerbated by more people becoming rich, which is a problem worth having.