Welcome back to the Strategic CSR Newsletter! The first Newsletter of the Spring semester is below. As always, your comments and ideas are welcome. |
The article in the url below contains some interesting/alarming/unsurprising/disputed data (take your pick depending on your perspective) about the level of global carbon dioxide emissions in 2010. These data were released in December and are the most recent available. Some excerpts from the article:
“Emissions rose 5.9 percent in 2010, according to an analysis released Sunday by the Global Carbon Project, an international collaboration of scientists tracking the numbers. Scientists with the group said the increase, a half-billion extra tons of carbon pumped into the air, was almost certainly the largest absolute jump in any year since the Industrial Revolution, and the largest percentage increase since 2003.
[Scientists] do not expect the extraordinary growth to persist, but do expect emissions to return to something closer to the 3 percent yearly growth of the last decade, still a worrisome figure that signifies little progress in limiting greenhouse gases. The growth rate in the 1990s was closer to 1 percent yearly.
In the United States, emissions dropped by a remarkable 7 percent in the recession year of 2009, but rose by just over 4 percent [in 2010], the new analysis shows. This country is the world’s second-largest emitter of greenhouse gases, pumping 1.5 billion tons of carbon into the atmosphere last year. The United States was surpassed several years ago by China, where emissions grew 10.4 percent in 2010, with that country injecting 2.2 billion tons of carbon into the atmosphere.
‘Each year that emissions go up, there’s another year of negotiations, another year of indecision,’ said Glen P. Peters, a researcher at the Center for International Climate and Environmental Research in Oslo and a leader of the group that produced the new analysis. ‘There’s no evidence that this trajectory we’ve been following the last 10 years is going to change.’”
Combining this news with the failure of the climate negotiators to reach a substantive agreement on an extension to the Kyoto Protocol in Durban in December (http://www.economist.com/node/21541806), together with Canada’s decision to pull out of the Kyoto Protocol altogether (http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/world-us-canada-16151310), and the end of 2011 was not good for the environment.
Something has to change, and pretty soon, although all the signs indicate that this change will not happen in 2012.
Take care
David
Instructor Teaching Site: http://www.sagepub.com/strategiccsr/
The library of CSR Newsletters are archived at: http://strategiccsr-sage.blogspot.com/
Global Carbon Dioxide Emissions in 2010 Show the Biggest Jump Ever Recorded
By Justin Gillis
December 5, 2011
The New York Times
Late Edition - Final
A4
