Economic slump, not natural gas boom, responsible for drop in CO2 emissions

University of California - Irvine

Irvine, Calif., July 21, 2015 - The 11 percent decrease in climate change-causing carbon dioxide emissions in the U.S. between 2007 and 2013 was caused by the global financial recession - not the reduced use of coal, research from the University of California Irvine, the University of Maryland, and the International Institute for Applied Systems Analysis shows.

Experts have assumed that the drop in emissions reflected a shift toward natural gas, which produces roughly half as much carbon dioxide per unit of energy as coal and was made cheap by the hydraulic fracturing boom. Instead, most of the credit should be given to changing consumer demand and slumping industrial output during the period, according to findings published today in the journal Nature Communications. The results are based on economic analysis of energy use, manufacturing, emissions and consumer demand between 1997 and 2013.