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:
“Consider the difference between looking and staring. A look is voluntary; it is also mobile, rising and falling in intensity as its foci of interest are taken up and then exhausted. A stare has, essentially, the character of a compulsion; it is steady, unmodulated, “fixed.””
—Susan Sontag (b. 1933)