With the rapid industrialisation in the 19th century with the metal industry booming, railroads connecting the country together and Oil being found as a new fuel source, More than 1,500 companies had been chartered and oil becomes humanities primary fuel source by the 20th century. While the trends have been very constant since the 1990s to 2017, OECD still is the primary consumer of energy while BRICS is catching up very quick (Oil industry, 2010). In this paper the analyses of resource consumption is going to be based on the following statement: As industrialization expanded over the Eastern countries, the resource consumption and investments in these industrializing countries increases, as a result, the increase in oil and energy consumption is leading to a higher emission of Co2.
All the writings in this paragraph have been cited from the tables unless otherwise stated(cite here for the tables) Change is the only thing that’s constant in the world, geography being no exception in that. Over the years we notice a lot of changes in usage of energy and oil consumption. While overall world oil consumption keeps on increasing over the past decades, the countries who use it the most changes overtime if we observe the current trend. Now more countries from the east consume more oil than the west. According to the table 1, trends have been very constant in terms of consumption of oils as the G7 has been the biggest consumer of oil throughout 1990-2017 time period. However when we look at countries the trends have been changing, as China’s oil consumption is now getting closer to USA and has surpassed USA for Co2 emissions. Also, it is currently the country that has the most Co2 emissions. The USA did reach its peak consumption in the year 2005 and since then it has started to decline its usage. The G7 also did decrease their consumption of oil. The article “What determines China's crude oil importing trade patterns? Empirical evidences from 55 countries between 1992 and 2015” says that it now consumes more than three times oil from 1990 to 2015 because China is industrializing and urbanising rapidly (“What determines China's crude oil importing trade patterns? Empirical evidences from 55 countries between 1992 and 2015”, 2017). India on the other hand has an increasing usage of oils as it develops.
Besides oil consumption, China is also the leading energy consumer. China’s energy consumption doubled compared to 2016 due to high industrial demand, which also explains the increase in Co2 emissions (“Total energy consumption: Acceleration in energy consumption in 2017 (+2.3% vs. 1.1% in 2016)”, n.d.). Energy consumption increased mostly in Asian countries like India, Indonesia, Malaysia, and South Korea and some other countries in Europe due to economic growth. However, it decreased in the UK, Canada and Russia due to recession in the past 2 years (“Total energy consumption: Acceleration in energy consumption in 2017 (+2.3% vs. 1.1% in 2016)”, n.d.).
In 2017, the use of renewable energy sources increased up to 25 %. United States, China, India, Japan and Australia started to increasingly use solar and wind energy due to new climate policies in the United Nations and the fact that the costs of solar and wind energy production decreased, which allows developing countries to expand their share of renewable energy sources. Norway produces 97.9% of its power from renewable sources which is a huge accomplishment, it’s followed by Columbia and New zealand which produce 86.8% and 81.4 of their energy from renewable sources respectively. (“Share of renewables in electricity production: Renewable energies are progressing quickly with falling costs”, n.d.). The reason behind Norway being able to source almost all of its power from natural resources is because they have been harnessing waterfalls since the 1800s making hydropower a part of the Norwegian society, However Norway also uses other types of natural energy to supply energy such as wind power and Thermal Power as well.“In 2013, Norway produced 134 terawatt hours (TWh) electricity(” Ministry of Petroleum and Energy, n.d.).
While humanity is trying to move towards a greener future with solar power and electric cars etc but worldwide Co2 emissions are still on the rise. USA and China are the top most polluting countries in the world while China being the worst offender as it produces almost double the amount of Co2 than the USA. Even though there is no country that has actually reduced its Co2 emissions but there are countries which are increasing their emissions with a higher rate than others (See table 2).
Sugihara, K. (2007, July)Industrialisation has taken two different paths in modern history one of them is ‘Western part’ which used capital and energy intensive industrialisation and ‘East Asian part’ which used Labour-Intensive Industrialisation. “This was the path followed by Japan from the nineteenth century and by many other countries in Asia during the twentieth century.”Sugihara, K. (2007, July).
To conclude, we can see that industrialization and economic status has a big influence on resource consumption and emission Co2 in Eastern countries. As mentioned before we are not looking at a reduction in Co2 emission. The use of technological innovations would be definitely helpful in improving the environment and the reduction of Co2 emissions. The authors of the article “A tale of two cities: Comparison of impacts on Co2 emissions, the indoor environment and health of home energy efficiency strategies in London and Milton Keynes” suggest that in order to reduce Co2 emissions we have to approach the strategies of decarbonization based on location instead of using one strategy for every part of the world. The strategies should be based on variations of the impact of Co2 emissions based on location on the costs and the benefits it has based that it comes with. All in all, in my opinion, technological innovations are helpful but the strategies to use them should be applied in certain way to benefit a certain area due to variations in the influence of Co2 emissions depending on location.