Continuing a blog topic from 2 posts ago, I wanted to zero in on the rise in CO2 emissions during my lifetime. I was born in 2002, where global CO2 emissions were 26.04 billion tonnes. Fast forward to our most recent data, with the 2021 global CO2 emissions were 36.4 billion tonnes. That’s a total change of 10.36 billion tonnes. The percent change of that data would roughly be a 40% (39.78%, to be exact) increase with a growth factor of 1.4.
While there has been some fluctuation in recent years due to the COVID-19 pandemic in 2020, on average the increase in emissions has remained steady. It’s scary to think about, but the total change, percent change, and growth factor could all possibly be even larger if the pandemic hadn’t happened. It’s important to reduce our personal, every day CO2 emissions, and hopefully we’ll live to see a time where the CO2 emissions have a decay factor instead.
Sources:
https://www.statista.com/statistics/276629/global-co2-emissions/
I agree, I think personal responsibility is a great conscious policy to adopt; however, the cost of the pursuit to be productive doesn’t outweigh the cost it takes to achieve a net-zero emission world.
I think that it is interesting and effective to look at the ways that CO2 emissions have changed during your time on this Earth. I also think that the fluctuation that you talked about during the COVID-19 pandemic is so interesting as it shows that nothing stayed the same during the crisis, no matter the field that we look at.
I appreciated how you tracked CO2 over the course of your lifetime. Very interesting stuff that you discuss here.
Do you have specifics on how the Pandemic has changed CO2 emission over time? I find that to be really interesting in the perspective of shopping during the pandemic in order to get necessities. How has shipping from websites such as Amazon effected CO2 emission compared to using gas mileage to pick up our items ourselves?