Global carbon emissions slowed for third straight year to near-stall

Emissions trends: China flattening, US flat, and EU dropping. But be very afraid of India's growth. (credit: Netherlands Environmental Assessment Agency)

Recently, the US released its analysis of the country's 2014 carbon emissions. It showed that while carbon emissions are still growing, their growth has slowed even as economic activity expanded. A new report indicates the same held true globally. Even though the global economy expanded by three percent last year, carbon emissions only rose by half a percent. The report raises the hope that we've partly decoupled economic growth and carbon emissions.

The analysis was performed by the Netherlands Environmental Assessment Agency in cooperation with the European Commission's Joint Research Center. It gathered statistics on energy use from governments, NGOs, and the energy industry to compile numbers on the energy economy and its carbon emissions.

In past years, the news was pretty grim. For roughly a decade, emissions were rising at about four percent a year, bringing CO₂ levels up to 400 parts-per-million earlier this year for the first time in millions of years. But earlier in this decade, the growth rate dropped to one percent a year for a couple of years. At the time, it wasn't clear whether this was a momentary blip or indicative of a long-term change.

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