The absolute rate didn't go down, but the proportional rate did. Because our energy consumption has increased.
It's kind of like arguing that there are more pirates today than there were 400 years ago. Yes, technically correct in absolute terms. In fact there's more of everything today. But that doesn't mean we are living in the age of piracy (the naval kind). And it shouldn't mean the current deployment of renewables is making no progress.
dude, we should have gotten to 0 emissions yesterday to prevent global ecological collapse. Any year in which we keep emitting at this rate, it's millions of preventable deaths in the years to come.
What is happening is that any renewable development slightly lowers the price of energy and so energy consumption increases, because there are no meaningful degrowth policies in place. This is a complete failure for the ideology of transition and for humankind as a whole.
You sure can make the case that humans are an invasive species, but the fact is that we are the overwhelmingly dominant species on this planet, so it is what it is.
The pirate example would be more accurate if there was a static, critical number of pirates that the world could handle before triggering a global catastrophic event. (I guess maybe that's technically already true?)
Global temperatures aren't going to reduce because we're putting 'proportionally less' CO2 into the atmosphere.
The article is oversimplifying it by looking at global data. When looking at data from individual countries there have been some energy transitions, so it is not like it is impossible to do. But yeah, the point of the article isn't complete non-sense.
the transition in post-industrial countries happens because they can consume industrial goods produced in other countries that are not transitioning. It's the same trick they use to make you believe plastic is recyclable.
Except that the primary limiter on the rate at which the poorer countries are transitioning is a lack of capital with which to build new cheaper renewables in a country scale example of it being expensive to be poor. Building local industrial goods is giving them the capital necessary to build renewables, it’s just lagging because Fossil companies are putting huge amounts of capital into slowing it.