Abstract Industry accounts for ~ 34% of global CO₂ emissions, positioning it as the largest single contributor to anthropogenic climate change. Understanding the historical trajectory is essential for effective mitigation, yet most analyses are short-term and long-term studies rarely examine industry. This article reconstructs consistent long-run series of industrial CO₂ emissions in Spain from 1890 to 2021, disaggregated by source (direct, indirect, and process-related) and by sector. Combining newly harmonized historical energy accounts with decomposition techniques (IPAT and additive LMDI), we quantify the relative contribution of value added, energy intensity of production, carbon intensity of energy use, and structural change to industrial CO 2 emissions trajectories. Emissions increased twenty-sevenfold between 1890 and 2007, with the sharpest rise occurring during 1950–1973. Spain’s path reflects a double delay: late industrialization produced a compressed, fossil-fuel-intensive take-off, while delayed adoption of efficient and low-carbon technologies after the 1970s reinforced carbon lock-in. Improvements in energy and carbon intensity have been consistently outpaced by output growth, revealing rebound effects and the limits of relative decoupling. As a late joiner, Spain shows how delayed industrial development shaped CO₂ emissions trajectories, as the dominance of non-metallic and building-materials industries produced a volatile, non-linear decline in carbon intensity, keeping it above early-industrializer levels into the twenty-first century. Deep decarbonization therefore requires targeted interventions in a small set of structural “hotspots,” alongside technological upgrading and material circularity to overcome the historical legacy of late development.
Sanjuán-Ruiz et al. (Mon,) studied this question.