Okay, so environment and development theories, I'm not going to say too much about this cause you heard a lot about them yesterday, but one of the things that some of us have been trying to do within environmental sociology is we've been trying to take these two rich theoretical traditions that you heard a lot about yesterday and see if we can sort of formalize hypotheses from these allegedly competing theories to then test using these sorts of quantitative measures.
And so early on a lot of cross-sectional research tried to do this and I think it did it and I did this as well where again if you're looking at a snapshot, you're really looking at correlations between development and some sort of environmental outcome and how can that really allow you to in any way test either of these perspectives, it really can't. And what would happen a lot of the earlier work is you'd have these studies including work that I had done that would report, okay, here's a positive correlation between some environmental bad in development, treadmill of production wins ecological modernization loses the end and then another study comes about. Well, I mean you heard a lot yesterday about that's not what these theories at all suggest.
Ecological modernization theory has not suggested that there would be a negative correlation between carbon emissions and development; the idea is that through time it's possible through all these different pathways that you heard about that overall through time development might somehow decouple with environmental bads or relative decoupling; it's not that development is going to be beneficial for the environment, but overall development is going to have reduced environmental impacts through time whereas a perspective like treadmill of production theory would perhaps suggest the opposite, it, the environmental impacts of development through time are going to continue to be pretty strong and perhaps might even increase in magnitude through time.
Now I realize that some of you may not agree with how my colleagues and I and other folks are operationalizing or formalizing these theories to do this kind of hypothesis testing and it's still an ongoing debate, I suppose. Just a small slice of that paper that some of you might have taken a look at where we use the longitudinal methods and we look at the relationship between development and per capita carbon emissions, well this is the per captia carbon emissions analyses where we separate and look at sort of a group of developed nations the Global North in a larger sample of nations within the Global South and we assess the extent to which the effects of development on per capita carbon emissions might change through time and I'll be honest with you,
These findings surprised the heck out of us and one of the things that really surprised me was how incredibly stable the estimated effect of development is on per capita carbon emissions through time for high-income nations; this freaked me out, freaked out my colleagues. It's been about two years making sure that I had done some sort of silly or not so silly methodological mistake, but based upon tests of statistical significance these findings hold across a whole lot of different kinds of, sensitivity analyses these findings were quite consistent, so we see here that on the one hand these are elasticity coefficients, so this number .757 means that 1 percent increase of per capita GDP lead to a .757 percent increase in per capita carbon emissions while taking into account all this other stuff in the model and there's a ton of other stuff in the model. But you see that it's relatively stable, so the effect isn't increasing, but it's not decreasing, it's also a lot bigger than it is in this other sample of nations, but if you look at nations within the Global South, we see that the estimated effect of development on per capita carbon emissions has, to some extent, increased through time.
The elasticity coefficient increased from .388 to .471 over this, this time period. Now our cut-off point here was 2005, a lot has happened perhaps since 2005, maybe, maybe not those are important empirical questions and I have some graduate students and colleagues that are kind of updating this kind of analysis to ask some important questions about well, what happened with the world economic recession when you look at relationships between development and environmental impacts pre, during, and perhaps post recent recession. Okay, so what does this tell us about that theoretical debate? I don't know, I think it tell, I'll let you all chew on that. Okay, another study though that I think is really interesting and this is an example of sociological research published in a science venue Nature Climate Change, so this is a study, have any of you seen this study that Richard York published a few years ago in Nature Climate Change? And so what he did is he asks a related, but different question than we did in our decoupling paper. Where he looked at whether or not, well he calls it, called it the asymmetric effects of growth and decline on CO2 emissions and sort of using similar methods and longitudinal data he found that he looked at situations in which there's like a year of economic growth and also situations in which, during a year there's a decline in GDP per capita and to ask, well are the effects symmetrical in terms of the effective growth on CO2 versus decline and growth on CO2?
And he found that they're not, he found that for, well I have highlighted in bold here for each 1 percent of growth in GDP per capita CO2 emissions per capita grew by .733 and this is for a, sort of a global sample of nations and this wasn't separating nations into different categories, but on the flip side though he found that for, in situations where there was an average 1 percent decline in GDP per capita emissions per capita declined by only .430 percent, so there's not sort of a symmetry in this in terms of growth and decline. I think this raises a lot more questions than answers that it provides, but I'd love to hear your thoughts on this, I'm sure Richard would as well. I guess I did throw up one analysis of a state-level analysis looking at similar types of relationships, so this is one state-level analysis and I also wanted to promote these folks, these are graduate students and they did an awesome study, they were not my graduate students, I wish they were, but I thought this was really neat because they were able to obtain
U.S. state-level data of the same sorts of relationships and looked at an anal-, a longitudinal analysis of state-level fossil fuel energy use and looking at really a variety of explanatory variables using the same methodology and the environmental Kuznets curve came up yesterday and so they were focusing also on this notion of environmental Kuznets curve and what they found is no evidence for environmental Kuznets curve when you adjust for energy prices, which I thought was pretty interesting and I just wanted to throw this up there because this is suggestive that you, these are scalable questions and there is sort of a growing tradition within environmental sociology,
Especially of younger generation scholars that are doing these kinds of analyses at smaller scales, which I think is really, really exciting and there's sort of an emergence and more state level data available on these sorts of things. Okay, so let me move on a little bit to some of these global theories. I want to spend a little time talking about, thank you Tom yesterday for doing a really wonderful job of introducing kind of this stuff up here and thank you very much Dana for introducing us too, so
I won't spend a lot of time talking about these, but what I am going to do is I'm going to show how some folks have tried to operational, operationalize these theories and assess the extent to which they do or do not impact the environment, okay, so this sort of idea of environmental load displacements of different types which is something that's talked about across disciplines. A lot of folks in ecological economics are talking about this, this is a big deal in political ecology, I mean this is an idea that's been around for a long time and we have different terms for defining this thing, but it's really about environmental inequality, kind of global or international environmental inequality between the Global North and the Global South and so, you know, I wasn't trained in environmental sociology
I was trained in international political economy by folks that study the structure of the world economy and so these are things that I've been interested in for a long time and trying to understand how the structure of the world economy might to some extent facilitate and maintain these kinds of environmental load displacements or environmental inequalities between the Global North and the Global South and so one of these or these two sort of perspectives that are interrelated that sociologists have been contributing to are ecological unequal exchange and the transnational organization of production; they both really sort of focus on how global production and trade networks might sort of facilitate or maintain these kinds of environmental load displacements and Tom yesterday mentioned vertical trade, thank you, cause the ecological unequal exchange stuff is largely focusing on this idea of the vertical trade of particular types of exports from the Global South to the Global North, so it's not necessarily how much you're trading, but it also matters where the stuff is coming from and where it's going, to some extent, from this perspective, but it's an important empirical question. The transnational organization of production stuff
I mean you've probably heard about this if you've ever watched The Story of Stuff video, you know, on the internet this idea of transnational corporations and that kind of stuff and so that sort of tied to this, this idea and this is also tied to a longstanding debate across disciplines trying to understand the environmental impacts of foreign direct investment which is a highly contentious debate that has existed in environmental economics for quite some time and it's also existed within sociology and so one of the ways in which we try to understand or assess the extent to which this facilitates environmental load displacement is by looking at how foreign investment in different economic sectors within especially developing nations might contribute to domestic levels of environmental degradation. Because it's been shown in a lot of research on foreign investment as a dependent variable that not all, but a non-trivial chunk of foreign investment in the developing world comes from the Global North not in a, you know, sort of in relative terms, but also it's important to recognize that this is changing through time, it's not so simple anymore, this isn't necessarily a core-periphery type of relationship, this is much more complicated than that and that's touched upon increasingly so in this literature by focusing on the horizontal and vertical sorts of linkages in global commodity production and trade networks too, and we're still trying to figure out how to bring all of that in to these kinds of macro-level quantitative studies. Okay,
The world society stuff, you heard about this yesterday, you've probably read this slide already, but this is, some would argue, another kind of globalization theory and what I think is interesting about this, and this came up in discussions yesterday, that early on world society scholars that started focusing on the world environmental regime looking at this sort of stuff, their dependent variable wasn't whether or not this was having any impact on the environment; they were studying this process, but then environmental sociologists like Buttel said hey, that's really interesting, but we're kind of curious whether or not this has any observable impacts on the environment and so in recent years world society scholars have tried to answer that critique and so
I'll show you how they've tried to deal with it. First though in terms of the ecological unequal exchange and environmental load displacement stuff, I wanted to show you this slide because this is based upon a study that I did a few years ago looking at this process of the vertical flow of exports from the Global South to the Global North and how it might contribute to growth in per capita carbon emissions in developing nations. Now that might change through time; in a nutshell we see that during a, you know, a pretty large range of time we see that there appears to be a growing effect of the vertical flow of exports on growth in per capita carbon emissions within developing nations.
Environment, Development, and Globalization - Part 01
Environment, Development, and Globalization - Part 02
Environment, Development, and Globalization - Part 03
Environment, Development, and Globalization - Part 04
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