Largest CO2 increase since the industrial revolution
by David Atkins
One of the silver linings of the recession was supposed to be that decreased manufacturing would lead to decreased CO2. Throw that out the window:
Global emissions of carbon dioxide from fossil-fuel burning jumped by the largest amount on record last year, upending the notion that the brief decline during the recession might persist through the recovery.
Emissions rose 5.9 percent in 2010, according to an analysis released Sunday by the Global Carbon Project, an international collaboration of scientists tracking the numbers. Scientists with the group said the increase, a half-billion extra tons of carbon pumped into the air, was almost certainly the largest absolute jump in any year since the Industrial Revolution, and the largest percentage increase since 2003.
The increase solidified a trend of ever-rising emissions that scientists fear will make it difficult, if not impossible, to forestall severe climate change in coming decades.
Meanwhile, the only significant conversation happening in America is over how much money the super-rich are going to steal, and whether we are going to be able to preserve the social safety net. The whole debate right now is over taxes and benefits.
We’re so far from making the needed investments in the future of our country and our planet that they’re not even a major part of the debate.
My grandchildren are going to look back one day and ask my generation and the generations that came before, why we fiddled as the planet burned. And all I’ll be able to answer is: “human nature. Greedy people don’t stop being greedy just because of impending catastrophe. Sorry, I did what I could.”
In a few decades, today’s biggest climate deniers will deserve to be tried for crimes against humanity. But by then, of course, conservatism will have embraced the science behind climate change. They’ll just contend that there’s no need to spend money mitigating its effect, since people who work hard and pull themselves up by their bootstraps will have no difficulty adjusting to the new, much hotter world.
That should be fun.
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