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Showing posts from February 20, 2011

Do renewables decrease global CO2 emissions?

Given the noisy propaganda about the positive impact of renewables, or "clean energy,"  or "green energy" on global emissions of carbon dioxide, one expects there would be some.  Unfortunately, there is none as far as I can tell.  In fact, the situation is even more hopeless than I feared in my darkest dreams. Here is the data from the International Energy Agency (IEA), plotted originally by P.F. Henshaw, and replotted a little differently by me. You can click on the plots to see them in high resolution. Above you see a semi-logarithmic plot of the normalized Global Gross Domestic Product (GDP),  Rate of use of energy in the world (Energy),  Rate of global carbon dioxide emissions (CO2), and  Dollars of income generated per unit of energy expanded globally per year ($/Btu).   All values are relative to those in 1971, and all curves start from 1. All trends are exponential, so they plot as approximately straight lines on the semi-logarithmic scale.  The glo