The 2008 economic crisis changed the US's relationship with energy

It wasn’t clear what the future of US carbon emissions would look like in 2013. After several decades of steady growth, they dropped precipitously following the 2008 economic crisis, then stabilized with a few ups and downs during a few years of tepid economic growth. It was unclear whether the previous relationship between growth and emissions would reassert itself.

Growth and decline

I follow energy issues and track the annual data as it comes in. Despite that, it has been tough to develop a clear picture of what emissions are doing in the US. For a while, it looked like we had moved into a sawtooth pattern, where several years of gradual decline would be largely offset by a sudden rise. Then there was a dramatic plunge and rebound during the pandemic years, followed by a few years of minimal change. Even in years when emissions declined, it was hard to feel confident that it represented part of a larger trend.

So I decided to look for myself. And when you graph the data, it’s clear that 2008 created an inflection point; since then, carbon emissions have trended downward despite year-to-year variability. As you can see in my graph, that has not come at the cost of economic growth—outside of the pandemic, that has remained steady.

The US has opened the scissors, too.

Since economic growth resumed following the 2008 crisis, it has been accompanied by slowly declining carbon emissions.

Credit: John Timmer

There are plenty of reasons to remain pessimistic. Even if emissions are trending downward, they’re not falling fast enough to help us avoid some of the worst impacts of climate change. Data centers are booming and often come with their own fleets of fossil fuel generators. The Trump administration is overtly hostile to renewable energy and even the slightest hint that it’s possible to do things efficiently. GDP also gives a limited picture of economic growth and says nothing about whether, or how, a population might be benefiting from it.

All that aside, the last decade-plus clearly indicates that the US can continue growing without rising carbon emissions. So even if emissions rise over the next few years, we can know it isn’t because it was necessary for economic growth, or that it is an inevitable reversal of recent trends.

We used World Bank data for US GDP, which is similar to alternative sources. Carbon emissions data comes from the University of Exeter’s Global Carbon Project.