Decoupling Delusions!: Green Growth Fails the Climate Test Particularly in MENA |
“Based on the annual analysis from NOAA’s Global Monitoring Lab, global average atmospheric carbon dioxide was 422.8 parts per million (“ppm,” for short) in 2024, a new record high. The increase during 2024 was 3.75 ppm—the largest one-year increase on record. At Mauna Loa Observatory in Hawaii (graph above), where the modern carbon dioxide record began in 1958, the annual average carbon dioxide in 2024 was 424.61 ppm, also a new record.”
[https://www.climate.gov/news-features/understanding-climate/climate-change-atmospheric-carbon-dioxide]
HOWEVER: A comforting new statistic is doing the rounds in climate policy circles. Recent research claims that carbon dioxide emissions have “decoupled” from economic growth across economies representing roughly 92 per cent of global GDP, with nearly half achieving absolute decoupling between 2015 and 2023. The implication is irresistible: prosperity can continue, emissions can fall, and the Paris Agreement can be met without painful trade-offs.
[https://eciu.net/media/press-releases/2025/92-of-the-global-economy-is-decoupling-emissions-from-growth]
[https://positivemoney.org/uk/archive/the-uks-decoupling-delusion-have-we-really-divorced-economic-growth-and-carbon-emissions/]
It is a tidy story. It is also dangerously misleading.
The problem is not that the data are fabricated. It is that the conclusions drawn from them confuse direction with speed, accounting with physics, and narrative comfort with climate reality. Decoupling, as currently observed, does not mean the world is on track for net zero by 2050. It means we have found a rhetorically........