House of War

1. As Tim Worstall notes, there is one major industrial country that didn’t ratify the Kyoto Protocoll, and one major industrial country that has actually reduced its total emissions. The country is the same in both cases:

Total U.S. greenhouse gas (GHG) emissions were 7,075.6 million metric tons carbon dioxide equivalent (MMTCO2e) in 2006, a decrease of 1.5 percent from the 2005 level according to ‘Emissions of Greenhouse Gases in the United States 2006’, a report released today by the Energy Information Administration (EIA).

U.S. GHG emissions per unit of Gross Domestic Product (GDP), or ‘U.S. GHG-intensity,’ fell from 653 metric tons per million 2000 constant dollars of GDP (MTCO2e/$Million GDP) in 2005 to 625 MTCO2e/$Million GDP in 2006, a decline of 4.2 percent. Since 1990, the annual average decline in GHG-intensity has been 2.0 percent.

2. Staying with the US, the eminent “Masonomist”, Don Bourdreaux of Cafe Hayek, has been examining the most recent iteration of Paul Krugman’s frequent accusation that the average American is not “sharing in the country’s prosperity” and that “whatever good economic news there is hasn’t translated into gains for most working Americans”. In response, Bourdreaux links to a Thomas Sowell piece summarising recent IRS data, stating that,

“People in the bottom fifth of income-tax filers in 1996 saw their incomes rise 91 percent by 2005. The top 1 percent … saw their incomes decline a whopping 26 percent. Meanwhile, the average taxpayers’ real income rose 24 percent between 1996 and 2005.”

Bourdreaux also has a chart, drawn from the IRS data, showing income mobility statistics:

Can’t get any clearer than that, what? I wonder if Krugman will take note…