Should the UK declare a “climate emergency” that would inform public policy and the national budget? The question was been debated in parliament on Wednesday, with the Labour leader Jeremy Corbyn declaring the government should “embrace hope” through stronger actions on greenhouse gas emissions, and the environment secretary, Michael Gove, calling the problem of climate change “an emergency”.

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Outside parliament, the activist group Extinction Rebellion has brought London motor traffic to a standstill on several occasions, and the youth activist Greta Thunberg has held meetings with leading politicians, including Gove and Corbyn but excluding the prime minister.

These events have taken place while the courts have given the go-ahead for a new runway expansion at Heathrow, rejecting the UK’s participation in the Paris climate change agreement as the basis on which transport policy should be decided. Meanwhile the government’s statutory advisers on climate change are likely to warn on Thursday that reducing greenhouse gases to net zero by 2050 is achievable but will require sizeable changes in public consumption habits, industry and government policy.

The UK’s emissions of greenhouse gases have fallen rapidly in recent decades, but the reasons have been complex. One has been the shift away from manufacturing and towards services, including financial services, which are lucrative but light on emissions, as the basis for economic growth and prosperity.

This has come at a cost – the UK coal mining industry was nearly annihilated in the 1980s and 1990s, and other areas of heavy industry shed more than a million jobs in the late 1990s and 2000s. But other areas of industry, such as renewable energy and research and development into low-carbon forms of technology, have shown rapid growth. There are estimated to be about half a million jobs in the low-carbon economy in the UK, though estimates vary widely depending on what jobs are classed as “green”.

Tonnes of carbon dioxide emitted per person have tumbled in the UK, while for other countries the equivalent emissions have risen. In the UK, the shift away from coal to natural gas – from the North Sea – in the 1990s was a key factor.

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In many developing countries, by contrast, in recent decades the shift has been towards bringing electrical power to those who previously were denied it. Taking people out of “energy poverty” has been a key factor in economic growth in the developing world, benefiting all sectors of society.

Yet it is possible for societies to move away from greenhouse gases while achieving growth in gross domestic product, as the UK’s recent history shows. This “decoupling” has been heralded by the UK government as an example to other countries, and the growth of renewable energy and much greater energy efficiency have been key to achieving this success.

Renewable energy, in the form of onshore and offshore wind and solar panels, was subsidised by successive governments from the 1990s, helping its early growth and boosting developments in the technology that brought down costs and made it more easily adopted. In recent years those subsidies in the UK have been slashed, but worldwide the costs of renewables have come down rapidly, making them more accessible to all countries.

Historic emissions have long been a bone of contention at international talks on climate change, which are carried on annually and in 2015 resulted in the landmark Paris agreement, which required countries to stay within at least 2C of global warming, with an aspiration to limit warming to no more than 1.5C above pre-industrial levels.

For many years, developing countries argued that one reason for wealthy countries to take on the lion’s share of emissions cuts was their greater responsibility for emissions before the 1980s, when climate change began to be recognised as a problem. In recent years, however, the rapidly rising emissions from developing countries such as China have dwarfed the UK’s own historic emissions, and this trend is likely to continue.

• This article was amended on 3 May 2019. The final two graphics represent megatonnes of carbon dioxide, not metric tonnes as stated in an earlier version.