Scientists have reported that world emissions of the greenhouse gas carbon dioxide increased three times faster after 2000 than in the 1990s. At the same time, a tendency toward cutting Earth’s energy intensity (the ratio of how much energy is needed to produce a unit of gross domestic product) appears to have stalled or even reversed in recent years.
Field, of the Carnegie Institution’s Department of Global Ecology in Stanford, California, said:
The study has found that between 2000 and 2004, worldwide carbon dioxide emissions increased by 3.1 percent a year, about three times as fast as the 1.1 percent rate of increase in the 1990s.
The study has found that the developing world, including India and China, and some of the least-developed countries accounted for 73 percent of the growth in global emissions in 2004 and contain about 80 percent of world population. By contrast, the study said the world’s richest countries contributed about 60 percent of total emissions in 2004 and account for 77 percent of cumulative emissions since the start of the Industrial Revolution.
This study goes to reinforce what environmentalists have been saying all along. Its time to realize that we are we are gaining fewer economic benefits from each tone of fossil fuel burned; Climate change is only getting worse. Do you save energy in any way?
Source: Reuters