New Thoughts About Environmental Sociology Research

The Annual Review of Sociology is a prestigious journal and I just had the pleasure to sit down and read this paper.

Beckfield, Jason, and Daniel Alain Evrard. "The social impacts of supply-side decarbonization." Annual Review of Sociology 49, no. 1 (2023): 155-175.

Decarbonization imposes costs on any economy and on different locations and different households within such an economy. Economists are actively measuring these effects. What if I told you that you could never drive your internal combustion engine vehicle again, how much would you lose from this mandate? Who would lose his job because of that mandate? That’s a supply side decarbonization effect.

Up front, I 100% agree that the question of how an economy makes a transition is interesting and important. Who has a stake in preserving the Status Quo? How much will they fight to keep the status quo? What is the minimum payoff (Coase Theorem) they would require to buy their veto? That’s interesting stuff. This isn’t discussed in this sociology paper.

I will start by sketching out the economist’s perspective on this issue. There are places (think of West Virginia) and people (coal miners and owners of coal stocks) who want the “old days” to continue. Jonathan Eyer and I explore this in our paper.

Eyer, Jonathan, and Matthew E. Kahn. "Prolonging coal’s sunset: Local demand for local supply." Regional Science and Urban Economics 81 (2020): 103487.

We document the empirical “coincidence” that coal mines sell tend to sell their coal to buyers located in their same political unit such as a county or a state. We control for the distance from the buyer to the seller. Our explanation for this “coincidence” is that elected officials are taking pro-active steps to nudge the buyers to be politically savvy here and to implicitly subsidize the coal community.

An interesting sociology issue arises here. The Coal Communities have built up housing wealth and social capital and their identity in a place that is at risk if coal use dries up. What do the Green progressives in Cambridge and Berkeley owe these middle aged people?

This great economics paper argues that Green elites should consider buying the world’s fossil fuels (rather than seeking to block or tax their use).

Harstad, Bård. "Buy coal! A case for supply-side environmental policy." Journal of Political Economy 120, no. 1 (2012): 77-115.

We argue that due to the political economy that Bard’s proposal would also need a jobs component. This Brookings piece builds on our logic.

Morris, Adele. "Build a better future for coal workers and their communities." Climate and Energy Economics Discussion Paper, Brookings Institution, Washington DC (2016).

This Sociology paper doesn’t discuss our research here.

NOW, an economist thinks about opportunity cost. If the schools were better in Coal areas then the children of coal communities could move to Big Tech cities. Why aren’t the schools better? Coal country kids attend public schools. Milton Friedman’s ideas of school vouchers and private school competition is not a popular idea in Sociology.

Now, what about the opportunity cost for these places? Some of these places have great nearby beauty. They could pivot to eco-tourism. Of course, mining has legacy long run damage for towns. But, in this case it is good to encourage people to move away. There is an economic literature on the benefits of having to move away from a depressed place.

The following papers are not cited in the Environmental Sociology paper

Deryugina, Tatyana, Laura Kawano, and Steven Levitt. "The economic impact of Hurricane Katrina on its victims: Evidence from individual tax returns." American Economic Journal: Applied Economics 10, no. 2 (2018): 202-233.

Nakamura, Emi, Jósef Sigurdsson, and Jón Steinsson. "The gift of moving: Intergenerational consequences of a mobility shock." The Review of Economic Studies 89, no. 3 (2022): 1557-1592.

In an overlapping generations model, the displaced coal miners age out. If their children receive a good education, they will migrate to more productive sectors of the economy. The place depopulates but the people adapt. Here are two relevant papers on this topic;

Hornbeck, Richard. "The enduring impact of the American Dust Bowl: Short-and long-run adjustments to environmental catastrophe." American Economic Review 102, no. 4 (2012): 1477-1507.

Huang, Robert, and Matthew E. Kahn. Dynamic Selection and the Puzzle of Slow Climate Change Adaptation in US Agriculture. No. w34771. National Bureau of Economic Research, 2026.

So, what does this 2023 paper actually do?

Here is it’s abstract;

“From the earliest studies examining the impacts of the coal-powered Industrial Revolution, the field of sociology has possessed an intimate, if often implicit, interest in the interconnectedness of fossil fuels and modernity. With the looming climate crisis, the world must rapidly wean itself from these resources in favor of others that emit little to no greenhouse gasses. And while this energy transition will likely have profound social implications, it has only recently begun to receive sustained attention from sociologists across subfields. Consequently, although debates have emphasized the technological and market dimensions of this shift, its relational dimensions and human aspects have remained relatively marginal. In this article, we review research on the social impacts of fossil fuel production and transitions to renewables. Such work is critical and urgent, since the main barriers to combating the climate crisis are neither technological nor economic; they are, instead, deeply social.”

I am not sure what to make of this Big Think manifesto.

Now some quotes from the middle of the paper’s introduction.

“In general, we argue that sociology should engage energy transitions with variable balances of description and demystification, theoretically guided and theory-building social analysis, and social criticism that speaks to the injustices and inequalities arising from the climate crisis. Any given project will strike a different balance among these fundamental sociological impulses. To aid scholars in finding that balance, we first examine the extraction, production, and distribution of energy as a series of social relations, processes, and institutional arrangements. Next, we review how the various groups and institutions involved in, as well as processes associated with, energy production are promoting, hindering, and shaping the energy transition. In many respects, the retirement of fossil fuel infrastructures and the concurrent development and deployment of renewable energy technologies represent a case of institutional development and macroeconomic transformation. For these reasons, we then formulate a series of hypotheses about the social impacts of ongoing energy transitions, drawing upon lessons from sociological research on previous macroscopic economic transformations such as deindustrialization”

Finally a quote from the conclusion that I disagree with;

“The experience of the Yellow Vest movement in France against carbon taxation policies, as well as the widespread opposition to decarbonization in the United States and elsewhere, has led energy scientists, economists, and policy makers to acknowledge that research on energy transitions must elevate social relations to the level of technological and market factors. Yet, even the most sympathetic of these scholars often lack the sociological knowledge necessary to adequately do so. Consequently, without the active engagement of sociologists in these increasingly urgent conversations, empirically inaccurate assumptions about social behavior are likely to be embedded into transition models”

I have written two papers on this topic and “sociology” isn’t needed here to explain the facts. The Yellow Vest opposition speaks to who bears the cost of decarbonization.

Cragg, Michael I., Yuyu Zhou, Kevin Gurney, and Matthew E. Kahn. "Carbon geography: the political economy of congressional support for legislation intended to mitigate greenhouse gas production." Economic Inquiry 51, no. 2 (2013): 1640-1650.

Kahn, Matthew E., and Somik Lall. Will the Developing World’s Growing Middle Class Support Low Carbon Policies?. No. w30238. National Bureau of Economic Research, 2022.

Glaeser, Edward L., and Matthew E. Kahn. "The greenness of cities: Carbon dioxide emissions and urban development." Journal of urban economics 67, no. 3 (2010): 404-418.

A simple model that people vote their own narrow self interest on environmental and climate change issues can explain voting patterns with a much lower dimensional model. We do not need messy models of culture to explain the voting patterns on environmental legislation. The Green Movement needs the full Becker Price of such products to decline, for people to be richer and more educated and to not be working in the industries that would be targeted by the regulation. When these conditions hold, people tend to vote and support decarbonization policies.

I think it is very useful to contrast how economists and sociologists think about the same issue. This highlights a type of Olympic competition for scarce resources as Deans think about what to invest i.