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Beliefs Matter: Local Climate Concerns and Industrial Greenhouse Gas Emissions in the United States

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Abstract

Industrial emissions of greenhouse gases are significant contributors to climate change, which poses a grave threat to social and economic systems. Our understanding of what might drive firms to reduce their emissions of these gases, however, is incomplete, and it is not clear that the knowledge gained from other environmental issues will readily apply to these emissions. We argue and find that indicators of environmental injustice previously shown to relate to toxic pollutants, for example, are poor predictors of greenhouse gas emissions. Instead, we show that the degree of belief in and concern about climate change in a local community is a significant predictor of the facility’s rate of emission improvements. Furthermore, we find that beliefs at both the facility and headquarter communities influence emission reduction, and that those effects are substitutes for each other.

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Notes

  1. One might argue that GHG emissions are associated with emissions of other co-pollutants, which would create an instrumental or self-regarding motivation for local communities to pressure facilities to cut GHG emissions. However, recent research finds that the relationship between GHGs and other criteria pollutants is extremely noisy, with 30% of facilities having a negative relationship between GHG emissions and co-pollutants (Burtraw & Roy, 2023).

  2. Liberalism and other demographic factors such as income (though in a complex manner—the relationship between wealth and beliefs appears to be moderated by political orientation—see, e.g. Bohr, 2014), education, and religiosity are related to climate belief (Howe et al., 2015). In our analysis, we control for a series of demographic variables in order to be more certain that our measure of belief is not simply reflecting one or more of these factors.

  3. There is also some recent work in the U.S. domestic context that explores production-shifting across facilities in response to regulatory pressures (Gibson, 2019; Rijal & Khanna, 2020). However, these papers do not focus on beliefs in a context without federal regulation; instead, they ignore the issue of beliefs and focus on changes in the enforcement of existing federal regulations. Moreover, they focus on production shifting rather than reductions in emissions controlling for production, as we do here.

  4. We note that Durand et al. (2019) would predict that once issue salience increases beyond a given point, firms will engage in symbolic compliance with the normative pressures. In our case, we observe only the substantive actions that firms undertake and not the more symbolic ones such as carbon offset purchases that leave core operations untouched.

  5. To put this in perspective, the EPA estimates that a typical passenger vehicle emits about 4.7 metric tons of CO2 per year. Thus, each facility in this database emits the equivalent of over 5000 passenger vehicles in CO2 per year.

  6. See https://www.epa.gov/climateleadership/scope-1-and-scope-2-inventory-guidance#:~:text=Scope%201%20emissions%20are%20direct,boilers%2C%20furnaces%2C%20vehicles).

  7. See https://www2.deloitte.com/uk/en/focus/climate-change/zero-in-on-scope-1-2-and-3-emissions.html.

  8. Unfortunately, this question was not asked regularly. It was asked again in 2012 but not in other election years, when the sample was large enough to create county-level estimates of concern. We do not incorporate the 2012 data because it would require us to interpolate measures for 2011 and 2013–2015 in order to have a time-varying measure.

  9. Howe et al. (2015) create a multilevel regression and post-stratification (MRP) model of the Yale-George Mason climate survey and create estimates of county-level belief in Climate Change from these data, which would make these data highly applicable for our purposes. However, in estimating the MRP, they include a measure of local emissions as a predictor of climate belief. Though their emission data are not from the GHGRP, their measure of climate belief might be endogenous to the very outcome we predict, and we therefore employ the CCES data.

  10. One other endogeneity concern is that climate belief may itself influence facility location (for example, a firm could choose to locate GHG-intensive production where climate belief is less prevalent in order to escape stakeholder pressure. This would work against our second hypothesis, however, since if this were the case we would not find evidence that greater climate belief at the HQ is related to lower emissions at a facility.

  11. https://www.dsireusa.org/.

  12. We obtained the number of Sierra Club members in a given chapter from the Sierra Club and then linked each chapter to a given county and measured the distance from each facility to the geographic center of each county.

  13. We recognize that there are multiple ways to measure a community’s income; we re-ran the analysis using the proportion of residents below the poverty line instead of median income and found insignificant results for that as well. We also re-ran the results using both income and race at the headquarters county, and found no effect—suggesting that companies headquartered in rich and/or white communities are not ‘dumping’ their GHG emissions on disadvantaged communities.

  14. We use the equation provided in Clogg et al. (1995) to test the differences between the two coefficients.

  15. Moreover, recent research in finance suggests that investors blend both prosocial and instrumental concerns in their investment allocation decisions (Hart and Zingales 2017), rendering it extremely difficult to disentangle the two when it comes to factors driving local manager behavior.

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Appendices

Appendix 1: Fixed-effects results

 

(1)

(2)

(3)

(4)

(5)

(6)

(7)

(8)

(9)

(10)

Increase in facility output

0.070***

(0.000)

0.071***

(0.000)

0.070***

(0.000)

0.070***

(0.000)

0.070***

(0.000)

0.070***

(0.000)

0.035**

(0.049)

0.107***

(0.001)

0.041*

(0.060)

0.103***

(0.000)

Clock

− 0.021**

(0.022)

− 0.023**

(0.015)

− 0.020**

(0.030)

− 0.025***

(0.009)

− 0.021**

(0.026)

− 0.024**

(0.012)

− 0.013

(0.188)

− 0.029*

(0.084)

− 0.014

(0.242)

− 0.029**

(0.042)

Count of state-level energy policies

0.004

(0.447)

0.005

(0.325)

0.003

(0.484)

0.005

(0.276)

0.004

(0.392)

0.006

(0.256)

0.004

(0.418)

0.006

(0.513)

0.003

(0.635)

0.007

(0.370)

Count of county-level energy policies

− 0.038

(0.175)

− 0.039

(0.165)

− 0.038

(0.178)

− 0.027

(0.328)

− 0.040

(0.150)

− 0.030

(0.273)

− 0.018

(0.561)

− 0.070

(0.155)

− 0.020

(0.419)

− 0.054

(0.205)

Number of corporate siblings

− 0.002

(0.241)

− 0.002

(0.267)

− 0.002

(0.245)

− 0.002

(0.264)

− 0.002

(0.224)

− 0.002

(0.246)

0.002

(0.323)

− 0.005**

(0.038)

− 0.001

(0.572)

− 0.005

(0.167)

Clock # log of median income in facility county

 

− 0.031

(0.180)

        

Clock # African American Pop (%) in facility county

  

− 0.000

(0.730)

       

Clock # facility county climate change concern

   

− 0.126**

(0.022)

 

− 0.113**

(0.043)

− 0.083**

(0.038)

− 0.161

(0.140)

  

Clock # HQ County climate change concern

    

− 0.119**

(0.023)

− 0.101*

(0.058)

  

− 0.155*

(0.056)

− 0.072

(0.285)

Constant

11.835***

(0.000)

11.774***

(0.000)

11.849***

(0.000)

11.754***

(0.000)

11.814***

(0.000)

11.744***

(0.000)

11.977***

(0.000)

11.608***

(0.000)

11.965***

(0.000)

11.615***

(0.000)

Observations

4046

4046

4046

4046

4046

4046

2013

2033

2061

1985

  1. ***, **, *Significance at 1%, 5%, and 10% respectively

Appendix 2: Change in sample as restrictions are applied

Variable

Full GHGRP sample

Only > 25 observations on CCES survey

Production ratio available

Not co-located with HQ

Log of total emissions

11.31

11.43

11.99

12.06

Utility

0.23

0.30

0.19

0.18

Food and beverage

0.05

0.05

0.08

0.08

Primary manufacturing

0.21

0.25

0.48

0.51

Other manufacturing

0.07

0.12

0.24

0.22

Transportation

0.08

0.05

0

0

Solid waste

0.08

0.05

0

0

Observations

40,816

13,551

5310

4046

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Dowell, G., Lyon, T. Beliefs Matter: Local Climate Concerns and Industrial Greenhouse Gas Emissions in the United States. J Bus Ethics (2024). https://doi.org/10.1007/s10551-024-05619-w

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