I worked on an existing commercial office building in 2006 (it took about 18 months) and lowered its natural gas and electricity consumption each by about 40% and consulted for other companies how to do the same. A large amount of older tech is just burning up resources for no reason. HVAC is one of the largest waste areas.

Question. There was a big drop in emissions during the pandemic. Is that the primary driver for this reduction over the last decade or is the signal still strong when you exclude those edge cases?

> In the early 2000s the rate at which humans produced these pollutants increased by about 3% a year.

That's a doubling rate of about 24 yeas which is rather insane when you consider the harmful effects and immediacy of climate change. It's perhaps a bit misleading to present percentages here when people are not generally adept at grasping their consequences. Is 3% a lot, or a little? Is 0.5% a good rate, or did we already have too much?

>The amount of energy required to produce a unit of GDP has fallen by 26% since 2000. Unlike in earlier periods of growth, increases in prosperity no longer require a similar rise in global energy use. Slower growth in the use of fossil fuels to supply that energy (especially coal, the dirtiest one) has further helped curb the growth of emissions.

I get the point but this would be more clearly presented in terms of GHG relative to GDP. What's interesting is this shows a slowing rate of decline with the past decade assuming a rather linear trend.

>The second factor concerns emissions due to land-use change. Getting rid of carbon sinks, by cutting down forests for farmland or digging up peatland for fuel, has a big impact on global emissions: a farm absorbs less carbon than does a rainforest. The Global Carbon Project, the outfit that calculates the budget, estimates that deforestation produces about 7 gigatonnes of carbon dioxide each year. Although the pace of deforestation continues unchanged, reforestation elsewhere has stepped up. New forest growth is absorbing nearly 4 gigatonnes of carbon dioxide annually, up from about 2 gigatonnes in 1990.

This misleading because it represents the harmful affects of deforestation in their direct, one time impact rather than long term ongoing source; for example deforestation of the Amazon rainforest has turned it from a carbon sink into a net producer of carbon (source: The Economist).

Edit: Also this trend in emission rate will likely continue to slow without drastic action as early improvements favor low hanging fruit i.e. we make the easy changes first which boosts the initial impact but overtime more difficult changes are needed to reach required negative emissions.

Are these natural sinks? The article is behind paywall.

Trouble I see is that they are using percent of previous year. So by growing by 3% for ten years, you're now at 134%. So now using that as you baseline lowers the apparent growth.

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I find it impossible not too. There's plenty of positive stuff to read, but the main thing keeping me going is that the other options are even less appetizing. There's the shrug and move on to see what happens-option. There's the roll up in a ball waiting for impending doom-option. Then I'd rather find big and small ways to make myself useful combatting the greenhouse-effect.

Eating and consuming less for me are good starting points. Insulating and electrifying the home. Being more mindful of what I still consume. Voting, pressuring politicians sharing opinions etc. etc.

I'm just an ickle wee man myself so I can't do as much as a billionaire could, but I can try to do my part.