U.S. Emissions Have Fallen Since 2008 as the Economy Kept Growing

Carbon dioxide emissions in the United States have been trending downward since the 2008 financial crisis even as the economy has kept growing, breaking a decades-old pattern in which emissions and growth rose together, according to an analysis published on Friday.

The analysis, by John Timmer, the science editor at Ars Technica, plots World Bank figures on U.S. gross domestic product against emissions data from the Global Carbon Project, a research effort based at the University of Exeter. Graphed over decades, the two lines split apart after 2008: growth resumed after the crisis and continued through everything but the pandemic, while emissions settled into a downward drift.

That outcome was far from obvious at the time. Back in 2013, after emissions had dropped steeply in the wake of the crisis and then leveled off through a few years of tepid growth, it was unclear whether the old relationship between economic expansion and carbon output would reassert itself, Mr. Timmer wrote.

Later years brought their own noise. For a stretch, the figures traced a sawtooth pattern, with several years of gradual decline largely canceled by a sudden rise. Then came a steep plunge and rebound during the pandemic, followed by a few years of little change. Even so, Mr. Timmer wrote, once the full record is graphed, “2008 created an inflection point.”

There are reasons for caution. Emissions are not falling fast enough to head off some of the worst effects of climate change, he wrote. Data centers are booming, often with their own fleets of fossil-fuel generators, and he described the Trump administration as openly hostile to renewable energy and even to efficiency itself. And GDP, he added, gives only a partial picture of economic life and says nothing about whether a population benefits from it.

Still, the record of the last decade and more shows the country can keep growing without rising emissions, Mr. Timmer wrote. If emissions climb in the years ahead, his argument goes, it will not be because growth required it or because the older trend was bound to return.