by Judith Curry
Gail Tverberg writes:
In a recent post, I discovered something rather alarming–the fact that in the last decade (2000 to 2010) both world energy consumption and the CO2 emissions from this energy consumption were rising as fast as GDP for the world as a whole. This relationship is especially strange, because prior to 2000, it appeared as though decoupling was taking place: GDP was growing more rapidly than energy use and CO2 emissions. And even after 2000, many countries continued to report decoupling.
Gail Tverberg at Our Finite World has a post entitled “Thoughts on why energy use and CO2 emissions are rising as fast as GDP.” Some excerpts:
I decided to sift through individual country results, to see if I could see a pattern emerging behind these changing results. When I did this, I found three major groupings of countries:
1. Southeast Asia, excluding Japan, Australia, and New Zealand. This group has been rapidly industrializing. In total, the group’s energy consumption has grown as rapidly as GDP in the last decade, and CO2 emissions have grown faster than GDP.
2. Middle Eastern Countries. This group showed energy use growing more rapidly than GDP, suggesting that it was taking more energy to extract oil and to pacify its population, over time.
3. Rest of the World. This group is the only group showing a favorable trend in energy growth relative to GDP growth, even in the last decade, although the pace of improvement has slowed. Two reasons for this favorable trend seem to be (a) continued growth of services, such as financial service, healthcare, and education, which use relatively little energy and (b) outsourcing of a major portion of heavy industry to Southeast Asia.
The vast majority of the CO2 increase since 1980 has taken place in the Southeast Asia and the Middle Eastern areas!
Based on data in this post, I come to the following tentative conclusions:
1. The industrialization of Southeast Asia has allowed importers from around the world to reduce their energy intensity of GDP, but much of the savings has been offset by greater energy use (largely coal) in Southeast Asia. On a CO2 basis, we are likely worse off, because of this transfer.
2. There is no evidence that the Kyoto Protocol reduced worldwide CO2 emissions. In fact, to the extent that it encouraged outsourcing of industrial production to the Far East and made goods from the Far East more competitive, it may have contributed to rising world CO2 emissions. It would appear that a different approach is needed that recognizes the fact that fuels are part of a world market. Fuel savings in one part of the world are not necessarily helpful for the world as a whole.
3. In my view, world industrial production has self-organized in a way that assigns different roles to companies operating in the three country groups I described above, as a way to minimize manufacturing costs. Over the long term, this particular version of self-organization cannot continue. The Middle East will reach a point where its oil exports drop rapidly. Southeast Asia will reach maximums on coal production/imports and on pollution levels. The “Remainder” is already reaching limits in competing with Southeast Asia. Unemployment rates are high, manufacturing wages are low, and many workers lack the income needed to purchase additional services which might “grow” GDP.
The Southeast Asia group has chosen to try to produce economic growth through the export of manufactured goods, making use of its inexpensive labor force and the availability of cheap coal. Southeast Asia’s cost advantage is especially great in energy-intensive manufacturing, because coal is relatively cheap, and new factories often use the latest technology, limiting fuel use.
When other countries buy exports from Southeast Asia, it starts a whole chain of other economic activity as well–new roads, more concrete buildings, and more workers with a high enough salary to afford cars. So the impact of outsourcing is much greater than the energy directly used in producing the goods for export.
The Kyoto Protocol may have aided Southeast Asia in developing its export-oriented economy. Once CO2 goals were announced, it was clear that signatory countries would want to limit energy intensive manufacturing in their own countries. An easy way of doing this was to substitute the purchase of goods made in countries such as in Southeast Asia. The limits on carbon emissions also made it clear that Southeast Asia would experience relatively little competition for coal in the world marketplace, because countries that signed the Protocol would be limiting coal imports.
Furthermore, if Kyoto Protocol signators enacted carbon taxes, the taxes would tend to make Southeast Asian products (and services such as oil refining), even more cost-competitive than they otherwise would be, since similar manufacturing and services would face no taxes in Southeast Asia. And any oil that was saved by the Kyoto Protocol would be available on the world market at a slightly lower price, further helping Southeast Asia.
JC comment: read the entire article, which has many graphs and additional analyses.