Posted on 01/12/2021 4:15:45 AM PST by Oldeconomybuyer
US greenhouse gas emissions tumbled below their 1990 level for the first-time last year as a result of the response to the coronavirus pandemic.
A preliminary assessment from research group Rhodium says that overall emissions were down over 10%, the largest fall since World War II.
Transport suffered the biggest decline, with emissions down almost 15% over 2019.
Energy emissions also fell sharply, due to a decline in the use of coal.
With stay-at-home orders in place, economic activity ground to a halt in March and April and this had significant implications for greenhouse gas emissions.
In transport, the restrictions on international travel and non-essential journeys saw demand for fuel fall sharply.
At the peak of restrictions demand for jet fuel was down 68% on 2019, with petrol down 40%.
They have both bounced back as travel bans were eased later in the year but jet fuel demand was still 35% down in December compared to the previous year.
When it comes to electricity though the picture is more complicated. Overall the demand for electricity was down just 2% but emissions fell by over 10%.
(Excerpt) Read more at bbc.com ...
Never mind the restrictions; the impact this Great Reset has had on many Americans’ discretionary income will be felt for years. Between employers’ belt-tightening and still-high grocery prices (despite the lack of shortages), it is clear more and more of us are just working for room and board - and many can’t even do that.
All we had to do was destroy lives and our economy.
As of 1 January, Colorado adopted the stupid-ass California emissions, rendering a replacement catalytic convertor prohibitively expensive. So the insurance is just totaling or salvaging the vehicles. I'm waiting on a salvage title for mine.
I got a cool little Accord (which passed emissions yesterday), because I need a car for work, but now I have to start the whole car payment thing all over again. I had two payments left on the Element!
Another emission in big fall is the emission of paychecks to employees.
The Green New Deal would result in similar effects. GDP and energy consumption are measures of the same thing, the latter being more honest and precise.
If you take minimum detectable yearly “increase” in temperature via measurement resolution and normal variation (say 0.1 deg C) and multiply it times the number of “new record high temperature years”, the cumulative increase in mean temperature would be several degrees Centigrade.
This has obviously not happened and we are still looking at mean temperature increases or decreases that are still in the uncertainty of the mean which makes it debatable whether there has been any true measurable increase or decrease in mean temperature .
It’s due to the consequences Covid-19. More people are working at home and FAR less air travel. Personal travel of almost every kind was way down.
joe biden is amazing... is election has spurred even pollution to leave the country...
>> Overall the demand for electricity was down just 2% but emissions fell by over 10%. <<
What happened? Renewable energy FINALLY became economically feasible for general-purpose applications. I know conservatives have been complaining for decades that solar, etc., are economically nonsensical, but sound technology has finally come... and not because of government investment. That only helped crowd out successful products. But technology which began as cost-effective only for niche applications has become cheaper and cheaper in a manner astonishingly similar to Moore’s Law.
Ain’t hard to do when your government drives 60% of our businesses out of business...
How much is due to fracking and cheap natural gas? And how long will that fracking last after January 20?
Greta Thunberg is pleased.
Exploiting workers impoverished by communism while polluting their environment is not a "sound technology". A Chinese solar and wind powered economy is still totally nuts. The real reason electric emissions fell is due entirely to horizontal fracking technology making fossil gas energy cheaper than fossil coal.
The Chinese aren’t the only ones making solar panels. The replacement of coal by gas is a HUGE factor, but to say it’s the entire reason is just simply false and ignorant. Electricity production by coal dropped by 228,000 GWh, but production by natural gas only rose by 78,000 GWh... making it responsible for only about 1/3 of the decline in coal use.
You just cited a fact you thought “must” be true because it fit your world view regarding energy which hasn’t been updated in years.
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