This is the Cato Daily Podcast for Wednesday, December 16, 2015.

I'm Caleb Brown.

With natural gas prices at historic lows and solar power coming online more rapidly than ever is the recent small decline in carbon

emission signal peak carbon, a sustained decline in carbon output.

Chip Knappenberger, Assistant Director of the Center for the Study of Science at the Cato Institute, offers his thoughts.

At Bloomberg, Noah Smith says that we've hit peak carbon, essentially because carbon emissions have declined.

What has driven the decline in carbon emissions

and is it possible that we have actually are going to experience a steady,

sustained decrease in carbon emissions from now on?

Highly unlikely.

That story is coming on the were slightly below carbon emissions in 2014.

It's anything, if you look at the long-term trend

or even the trend over the past decade,

it's continually and steadily upward.

Although there's some variations about that trend and so in 2015 the emissions at least

preliminarily are going to come in slightly below 2014.

I seriously doubt that's going to continue into the future.

If you dig down into what has caused that slight decline in emissions over the past year,

you have to point the finger at China where there's been a little bit of a slowdown in the Chinese economy and that slowdown in the Chinese economy since it's fueled mostly by coal has led to a slight drop in CO2 emissions from China

based on the back of a little bit lower coal use than the year before and that's

probably the reason.

If you look back through time at the CO2 emissions or the CO2 emissions curve,

...