This paper challenges the idea that emissions of greenhouse gases simply increase over time with income. It adopts a 200‐year perspective and includes the important flows of greenhouse gases related to agriculture, not just the CO2 from fossil fuels. The result is that the pattern of Swedish total greenhouse gas emissions over time resembles an N. In contrast, when only emissions from fossil fuels are counted, the pattern over time resembles an inverted U. Among the most important factors generating emissions in agriculture, forest management was especially important, but in addition, draining of wetlands for agriculture played a substantial role.
This paper argues that there is reason to be skeptical about the idea that the transition to a service economy will bring about dematerialization of production and consequent environmental improvement. This is because the shift to a service economy is an illusion in terms of real production, but is instead generated by the fall in the price of manufacturing goods relative to services, which is in turn caused by more rapid productivity growth in manufacturing than in services. This argument relies on the insights Baumol provided on the nature of the service economy and uses Swedish long-term data on relative sectoral development as an empirical illustration. On the other hand, the paper argues that there is reason to be cautiously optimistic that structural change may bring about a greening of growth, namely the changes in growth patterns sometimes labeled the third industrial revolution, which is connected to the emergence of microelectronics. Swedish CO2 emissions show a decline after 1970, which is mainly explained by a politically driven change in the mix of energy carriers, but is also related to the stabilization of energy consumption. This energy stabilization was caused by slow growth of the economy in conjunction with substantial declines in energy intensity within industrial sectors and an absence of relative growth of the heavy sectors, a growth that had marked the economy between 1870 and 1970. Microelectronics have contributed to permanently transforming the Swedish industrial sector in a lighter direction, reducing energy losses in heavy industries and stabilizing household energy consumption. So it appears as if there may be some environmental gains from this development that was initiated in the 1970s, but not from relatively more production in the service sector.
This article explores the proposition that a reason for high agricultural productivity in the early nineteenth century was relatively high energy availability from draught animals. The article is based on the collection of extensive new data indicating different trends in draught power availability and the efficiency of its use in different countries of Europe. This article shows that the proposition does not hold, and demonstrates that, although towards the end of the nineteenth century England had relatively high numbers of draught animals per agricultural worker, it also had low number of workers and animals per hectare, indicating the high efficiency of muscle power, rather than an abundance of such power. The higher efficiency was related to a specialization on less labour‐intensive farming and a preference for horses over oxen.
This study utilizes recently published environmental extensions to the World Input–Output Database (WIOD) to compare production-based, consumption-based and technology-adjusted carbon emissions for 44 countries and country groups for the period 2000 to 2014. Results show some significant shifts in global emission trends compared to similar studies of the period before 2009. For 20 European Union (EU) countries and the US, emissions decreased over the period regardless of measure, and the same was true for the EU. Since GDP grew in 18 of these countries, the results provide unambiguous evidence for absolute, albeit modest, decoupling of economic growth from carbon emissions. The large increase in global emissions that nevertheless occurred during the period was driven almost entirely by increasing consumption in China and developing countries. ; ISSN:1996-1073
AbstractAlthough climate change and international trade are interdependent, policy-makers often address the two topics separately. This may inhibit progress at the intersection of climate change and trade and could present a serious constraint for global climate action. One key risk is carbon leakage through emission outsourcing, i.e. reductions in emissions in countries with rigorous climate policies being offset by increased emissions in countries with less stringent policies. We first analyze the Paris Agreement's nationally determined contributions (NDC) and investigate how carbon leakage is addressed. We find that the risk of carbon leakage is insufficiently accounted for in these documents. Then, we apply a novel quantitative approach (Jiborn et al., 2018; Baumert et al., 2019) to analyze trends in carbon outsourcing related to a previous international climate regime—the Kyoto Protocol—in order to assess whether reported emission reductions were offset by carbon outsourcing in the past. Our results for 2000–2014 show a more nuanced picture of carbon leakage during the Kyoto Protocol than previous studies have reported. Carbon outsourcing from developed to developing countries was dominated by the USA outsourcing to China, while the evidence for other developed countries was mixed. Against conventional wisdom, we find that, in general, countries that stayed committed to their Kyoto Protocol emission targets were either only minor carbon outsourcers or actually even insourcers—although the trend was slightly negative—indicating that binding emissions targets do not necessarily lead to carbon outsourcing. We argue that multiple carbon monitoring approaches are needed to reduce the risk of carbon leakage.
