Abstract:*

Progress fighting climate change has been hindered by a lack of consistent government policy over time, which is exacerbated by growing political polarization. We explore whether local political polarization has affected progress in reducing greenhouse gas (GHG) emissions at industrial facilities in the United States over 2010 – 2021, using US GHG Reporting Program and Toxic Release Inventory data, US county-level election returns, and state-level carbon and energy prices and policies.  We find a gradual downward trend in emissions and an upward trend in the effect of local partisanship over this period, although the latter is not significantly different from the baseline until 2017. This partisanship effect accelerates over time and by 2019, the net effect of these two trends results in facilities located in more Republican areas emitting more than those in less Republican areas, after controlling for other factors. While price effects dominate non-price effects overall, non-trivial local partisanship effects cannot be readily explained by standard models of competitive strategy or economic rationality. Our results are consistent with emerging literature suggesting that CEO political attitudes and local “logics” have significant effects on corporate environmental performance. Growth of the partisanship effect since 2016 suggests that political parties adopting positions of climate denialism has real impacts on facility performance that extend beyond blocking federal carbon price policies.

*Co-authored with G. Dowell (Cornell University)

About the SEEMS Seminars

Over the past years the number of researchers at UvA Economics & Business that work on Environmental Economics and Sustainability has increased significantly. To provide a natural meeting place for them, we have started a series of Seminars on Environmental Economics and Management of Sustainability (SEEMS).

The series’ first main goal is to increase the visibility of Environmental Economics and the Management of Sustainability at UvA and the visibility of UvA within these fields. Its second main goal is to give PhD candidates working on topics in these fields access to the frontier of knowledge, and to provide them with a training ground where they can present and discuss their ideas.

Are you interested?

This will be a hybrid seminar. If you are interested in joining this seminar, please send an email to the secretariat of ASF at asf-feb@uva.nl.