Back in June 2014, we were among the first to observe in near real-time that China’s economy had cooling to the point where it could be considered to be in recession, which we based on a unique combination of trade and environmental data. The recessionary conditions that we observed persisted from 2014 through mid-2016, when they finally began to reverse. We noted at the time that both trade data and the measurements of carbon dioxide emitted into the atmosphere indicated that the Earth’s economy was cooling during that period.
In January 2017, the outgoing Obama administration claimed that the global economy was growing while carbon emissions were flat, an apparent decoupling between the two that directly contradicted our observations.
On 13 November 2017, we got a stunning vindication of our observations from the Global Carbon Project, which released its latest updates and measurements for worldwide carbon emissions, via the Financial Times, which reported the following (emphasis ours):
Stronger Chinese economic growth will push global greenhouse gas emissions to a record high in 2017 after remaining flat for three years, dashing tentative hopes of a turning point in the world’s efforts to curb climate change.
A new report by the Global Carbon Project, an international research consortium, predicts that carbon dioxide emissions from fossil fuels and industry will rise 2 per cent this year. The report was released at the UN climate change meeting in Bonn on Monday….
This year’s rise is especially disappointing as it follows three years of almost no growth in emissions despite a world economy expanding at a steady clip. In 2016, emissions were flat even though the world economy grew 3.2 per cent. One explanation for the uptick is that China’s economic slowdown in the middle part of this decade was more pronounced than official figures suggested.
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