Story at a glance
- An estimate finds that U.S. greenhouse gas emissions fell by 2.1 percent in 2019.
- The Trump administration’s decisions around environmental policy will make it harder to continue this downward trend, let alone make more significant progress on emissions reduction.
An estimate by Rhodium Group, an independent research firm, finds that greenhouse gas emissions fell by 2.1 percent in the U.S. last year, Reuters reports. The research was based on preliminary energy and economic data, since the official U.S. data on 2018 and 2019 have not been released yet.
Meanwhile, 2019 was a year full of environmental rollbacks in the U.S. under the Trump administration. In November, President Trump sent his formal notification to the United Nations to withdraw the U.S. from the Paris agreement on climate change drafted in 2015. These decisions will make it harder for the U.S. to continue its downward trend on greenhouse gas emissions, let alone meet the more aggressive goals needed to avoid the most catastrophic effects of climate change.
The analysis notes, “The switch from coal to natural gas and renewables in the electric power sector accounts for the majority of the progress the U.S. has made in reducing emissions over the past decade.”
There is less good news outside of the power sector, the Rhodium research notes. For example, they estimated that transportation emissions only declined slightly: a mere 0.3 percent in 2019.
Trevor Houser, the head of energy and climate at Rhodium, told Reuters that the Trump administration’s policy on vehicle efficiency “raises doubts about our ability to … turn what is now flat transportation emissions into declining transportation emissions.”
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