Energy Use, GDP, and Greenhouse-Gas
Emissions
The data in Figure 17-7 suggest that it is not easy for a country to
achieve significant reductions in greenhouse-gas emissions. If it were
straightforward to achieve sizeable reductions, then presumably
emissions would not have grown in several large countries that claimed to
be committed to achieving their stated emissions-reduction targets. Why
are such reductions so difficult to achieve?
To organize our thoughts, it is useful to think about the following
equation, which expresses GHG emissions in terms of three essential
components:
where “GHG” is the world’s annual emissions of greenhouse gases,
“Energy” is the amount of energy consumed globally per year, and “GDP”
is the world’s annual gross domestic product. It is obvious that Equation
17-1 is identically true since one could easily cancel out the “GDP” and
“Energy” terms to get.
GHG= EnergyGHG ×EnergyGDP ×GDP(17-1)
GHG = GHG