Achieving net zero global carbon emissions by 2050 will undoubtedly be a vast challenge.
🌏🏭
Yet there's also a bit of a danger that we assume it's unachievable given our current economic model or rates of population growth.
A brief thread...🧵
...Pessimism is perhaps natural when you look at the global trajectory of emissions.
Despite the landmark summits and the big pledges, global emissions have continued to rise...
...and so has the size of the global population...
...yet emissions have *not* risen as fast as overall global economic activity...
...which is another way of saying that the carbon intensity of global economic growth has been falling...
...As for emissions per head of global population, they have risen as the likes of China and India have industrialised - but they've also stabilised in recent years...
...and in the US - which has one of the highest levels of emissions per capita of any country - they have been falling...
...We need to keep those lines falling and indeed to speed it up so they hit zero by mid century, if not before.
It will be a challenge - but be wary of those who proclaim it's impossible.
We have already demonstrated progress & we have the potential to produce much more.
...More reasons to be positive in this report by Neil Shearing of @CapEconUK
"Tackling climate change doesn’t mean sacrificing economic growth" 👇
In the wake of the Bank of England’s latest forecasts the media is full of talk of an economic “boom”.
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One headline this morning even calls it a *supersonic* boom.
What to make of that kind of talk?
A thread…🧵
...It’s true GDP growth of 7.25%, the Bank's latest forecast for 2021, would be the largest calendar year expansion since 1941 when Britain was still scaling up production to fight the Nazi menace...2/
...But, as we shouldn’t need reminding, this follows the worst year for the economy in three centuries in 2020...3/
As expected, no change in Bank of England rates or QE target - but MPC has decided to slow the rate of its asset purchases so they stretch out to the end of the year
A thread on the real world costs of government not being transparent.
🧵🦞
Last year the Shellfish Association of Great Britain @SAGB asked @DefraGovUK to provide full details of what it had been told by the EU about permissability of live exports to the bloc post-Brexit..1/
...Defra refused to pass on the details directly.
Instead, it gave a summary to the industry which turns out to have been incorrect.
Result: large quantities of live shellfish not being allowed into EU this year at huge cost to firms...2/
...Defra blames the EU for not being clear/covertly changing the rules.
The EU blames Defra for minsinterpreting the information it was given...3/
Worth noting that the Biden Administration's policy on vaccines, as spelled out in his Congress speech on Wednesday, is almost literally "America first"...
...we can debate about whether the EU and UK are guilty of vaccine nationalism but there's really no question that, whether it's right or wrong, that's what we're seeing in the US.
...On this subject, this new @BBCTheInquiry episode by @kavpuri suggests one of the roots of the crisis afflicting India is the Delhi government relying *only* on domestic vaccine production - and failing to order further supplies from overseas...👇 bbc.co.uk/sounds/play/w3…
...And the official trade figures do suggest a reasonably strong bounce back of exports in overall manufacturing exports in February after the plunge in January.