Will technology advances alleviate climate change? Dual effects of technology change on aggregate carbon dioxide emissions

Abstract

The relationship between technology change and carbon dioxide emissions is complex. Existing research has emphasized technology progress in reducing carbon emission intensity but has ignored the impact of technology progress on economic growth, which leads to changes in carbon dioxide emissions. We argue that technology has relatively independent economic and environmental attributes. To provide evidence for this, we developed a method to distinguish the scale effect of technology change and its influence on economic scale from the intensity effect of technology change and its influence on carbon emission intensity. We applied this method to study the impact of technology change on carbon dioxide emissions in 95 countries between 1996 and 2007. We found that technology change indeed reduced aggregate carbon dioxide emissions, but the scale and intensity effects of technology change separately expressed positive and negative values. As a consequence, previous studies that only consider the intensity effect overestimate the impact of technology change on carbon dioxide emissions. Our findings yield important considerations for carbon dioxide emissions control in policy making.