The USA is the exact opposite example of this. US carbon emissions have fallen 15% since 2005 but the massive US economy continues to grow. There’s no requirement that more growth always == more pollution.

While GDP growth has historically been strongly correlated with energy use and pollution (including CO2/greenhouse gas emissions), due to the switch to service and digital economy, in rich countries GDP growth has become decoupled from energy use for a few decades already, already before year 2000. The correlation is already broken, and it seems quite plausible to continue GDP growth even with a decrease in energy use and waste/pollution generation.

> due to the switch to service and digital economy, in rich countries GDP growth has become decoupled from energy use for a few decades already.

They just pushed pollution elsewhere, by outsourcing manufacturing.

That strengthens the effect, but no, the growth is decoupled even if you take into account the energy and pollution cost of the outsourced manufacturing.

The same goods (and better goods) take less energy and pollution to produce than in 2000, and a lot of physical goods have been effectively replaced with features in digital devices; and the main part of GDP growth for developed countries does not involve any growth in consumption of goods but rather the consumption of services - the shift from an industrial economy to a service economy has quite fundamental impact on the nature of growth.

> The same goods (and better goods) take less energy and pollution to produce than in 2000

But thanks to the rebound effect we make/sell/trash more of them

Like with airplanes, it doesn't matter that Rolls-Royce make their engines 5% more efficient every 10 years if in the meantime you have 4 times as many plane flying.

Do you have a current source on the decoupling claim accounting for outsourcing?

That's a good trend if true.

It was true in the UK ten years ago (although this Guardian article[0] tried to downplay the success):

> The amount of greenhouse gases linked to goods and services consumed by UK households, including emissions from the foreign manufacture of imported products, rose by 3% between 2012 and 2013, the most recent data shows. But the figures are almost a fifth (19%) below the peak seen in 2007, when UK consumers were responsible for nearly 1.3bn tonnes of greenhouse gases.

[0] https://www.theguardian.com/environment/2016/aug/02/uks-carb...

> GDP growth has become decoupled from energy use for a few decades already, already before year 2000

Only because we delocalised all the industries to Asia, globally co2 = gdp, before and after 2010

https://jancovici.com/wp-content/uploads/2019/02/GDP-CO2-wor...

https://www.researchgate.net/profile/Gabe-Scelta-2/publicati...

A different analysis here:

https://eeb.org/wp-content/uploads/2019/07/Decoupling-Debunk...