From the WaPo (U.S. greenhouse gas emissions spiked in 2018):
U.S. carbon dioxide emissions rose an estimated 3.4 percent in 2018, according to new research — a jarring increase that comes as scientists say the world needs to be aggressively cutting its emissions to avoid the most devastating effects of climate change.
The findings, published Tuesday by the independent economic research firm Rhodium Group, mean that the United States now has a diminishing chance of meeting its pledge under the 2015 Paris climate agreement to dramatically reduce its emissions by 2025.
The findings also underscore how the world’s second-largest emitter, once a global leader in pushing for climate action, has all but abandoned efforts to mitigate the effects of a warming world. President Trump has said he plans to officially withdraw the nation from the Paris climate agreement in 2020 and in the meantime has rolled back Obama-era regulations aimed at reducing the country’s carbon emissions.
The sharp emissions rise was fueled primarily by a booming economy, researchers found. But the increase, which could prove to be the second-largest in the past 20 years, probably would not have been as stark without Trump administration rollbacks, said Trevor Houser, a partner at Rhodium. ...
Rising emissions are not just a U.S. problem. Global emissions also reached a record high in 2018, and the increase in the United States goes hand in hand with rising emissions in other countries, such as China and India, said Michael Mehling, deputy director of the Center for Energy and Environmental Policy Research at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology.
“It’s not an isolated phenomenon,” Mehling said, adding that the trend makes it difficult to solely blame the Trump administration’s deregulatory push and its dismissal of climate action for the change. ...
The key issue now is how all of this plays out over the next two years, leading up to 2020. That is both the year when the United States can formally exit the Paris climate agreement and the year when member countries need to announce more-ambitious climate plans.
That leaves a world facing a make-or-break decade for emissions reductions still unsure of exactly what role the United States will play, if any.
“Other countries are going to be looking at the [2020 presidential] campaign,” Wirth said. “If you’ve got all presidential candidates with the exception of one running for election saying, ‘I’m prepared to commit to bigger reductions,’ then that will resonate.”
The headline is likely an overstatement. Did emissions spike? Emissions in 2018 are still below the pre-Great Recession peak and below several years since the decline began (again, due to the Great Recession). There may be some sort of cyclical pattern here too. In other words, there have been three "spikes" since the peak. The most recent may be related to the 2018 tax cut. As that wears off we might get closer to the Copenhagen Accord target in 2019 and a recession in 2020 might really nail it.
