Intensity Targets
The U.S. plans to cut carbon intensity per dollar of GDP by 18% by 2012. This has been criticised by the World Resources Institute as this approach does not ensure absolute reductions if GDP grows faster than intensity declines.
From 1990 to 2000, the carbon intensity of the U.S. economy declined by 17%, yet total emissions increased by 14%. In 2002, the U.S. National Environmental trust labelled carbon intensity, "a bookkeeping trick which allows the administration to do nothing about global warming while unsafe levels of emissions continue to rise."
Read more about this topic: Emission Intensity
Famous quotes containing the word intensity:
“The bourgeois treasures nothing more highly than the self.... And so at the cost of intensity he achieves his own preservation and security. His harvest is a quiet mind which he prefers to being possessed by God, as he prefers comfort to pleasure, convenience to liberty, and a pleasant temperature to that deathly inner consuming fire.”
—Hermann Hesse (1877–1962)