Don’t tell ‘Mad’ Ed Miliband

Wednesday-Thursday blog

Being an extremely boring person with no friends, no love and no social life, I was looking at some figures yesterday. That’s the kind of thing I do to fill my empty days.

I looked at the growth/reduction in CO2 emissions for several countries for the period 2014 to 2024 and compared these to growth/reduction in GDP per Capita for these countries.

CO2 is, of course – depending on your viewpoint:

• a wonderful gas which is the basis for all life on Earth and increases in atmospheric CO2 levels are leading to a greening of the Earth
• an evil poison which will destroy mankind due to CO2’s role in supposedly causing ‘Global Boiling’.

Here are the 5 countries with the greatest increase in CO2 emissions for the period 2014 to 2024:

1. Vietnam – CO2 emissions up 106% – GDP per Capita growth over 65%
2. Indonesia – CO2 emissions up 63% – GDP per Capita growth over 40%
3. India – CO2 emissions up 49%% – GDP per Capita growth over 72%
4. Turkey – CO2 emissions up 40% – GDP per Capita growth over 24%
5. China – CO2 emissions up 23% – GDP per Capita growth over 75%

And here are the five countries with the greatest reductions in CO2 emissions:

1. Britain – CO2 emissions down 29% – GDP per Capita growth over 10 years about 4%

2. Germany – CO2 emissions down 28% – GDP per Capita growth over 10 years about 11%

3. Japan – CO2 emissions down 24% – GDP per Capita growth over 10 years about minus 12%

4. Italy – CO2 emissions down 14% – GDP per Capita growth over 10 years about 9%

5. Brazil – CO2 emissions down 13% – GDP per Capita growth over 10 years about minus 16%

(Please note that the GDP per Capita growth/decline rates for the above five countries are not ‘per year’, they are the total for the ten year period)

Obviously each of these countries will have specific political and economic reasons for the level of GDP per Capita growth or decline over the 10 years from 2014 to 2024. But there nevertheless seems to be a correlation that most people will find blindingly obvious – the countries with the highest increases in CO2 emissions generally have the highest growth rates while the countries with the greatest reductions in CO2 emissions have the worst growth/decline rates.

We all could have guessed this. But please nobody tell ‘Mad’ Ed Miliband otherwise he will double down on cutting Britain’s CO2 emissions in order to impoverish us all even faster than he is so successfully doing at the moment.