There’s a game played about reducing US carbon emissions that I find annoying. It involves making a big deal about announcing timelines, but not actually taking the steps needed to meet those timelines. For example, as President Biden was leaving office late 2024, he annouced a goal that the US economy would be net-zero for carbon emissions by 2050. Or at the state level, California announced that zero-emissions cars would be two-thirds of all cars sold in California by 2030 and 100% of all cars sold in California by 2035.
Well, how is that going? Here’s the figure from a 2024 EPA report showing US greenhouse gas emissions from 1990 to 2022. As you can see, there’s a modest rise from 1990 into the early 21st century, and then a modest decline since around 2007. But at least for me, it’s pretty hard to look at that figure and extrapolate to net-zero emissions by 2050.
For those who view carbon emissions and the risks of global warming as existential issues, this figure should suggest that the timetables for when the US will have all zero-emission cars and net-zero carbon emissions is so far mostly fluff and foofaraw, and the actual on-the-ground progress on reducing greenhouse gases is not very impressive so far. Indeed, most of the US reductions in carbon emissions can be traced to burning less coal and more natural gas. Moreover, the very modest levels of US progress in reducing greenhouse gas emissions have an even more modest effect from a global perspective, given that China is 31% of global carbon emissions and rising, while the US economy is 13% of global carbon emissions and falling.
