Abstract:
Carbon dioxide emissions resulting from industrial and embodied social processes are well recognized as a leading driver of global environmental change and climate injustice. However, the social activities that underlie CO2 emissions are not uniformly dispersed. In addition to extra-political actions that have guided the distribution of resources and pollutants, such as racial violence, policy practices such as the Home Owner Loan Corporations’ “redlining” maps have helped to define the geographies of production and pollution that, together, drive anthropogenic climate change and social inequality. To better understand these dynamics, I rely on areal interpolation to assign HOLC grades to census tracts in city centers across the contiguous U.S. for the years 2010 and 2015. I construct random coefficient models to cluster tracts within city centers and estimate the influence of redlining on contemporary carbon dioxide (CO2) emissions at a local scale. Results reveal that in the period observed the majority of CO2 emissions are attributable to spaces that have experienced social disinvestment as a result of HOLC grading, or been “redlined”. Decomposing emissions by sector, however, reveals that while most industrial emissions can be traced to racialized, redlined spaces, residential emissions are dominant in spaces favored by HOLC grading– those that were “greenlined”. These findings suggest that, in addition to being central to addressing the iniquitous impacts of climate change, addressing historical inequalities that inform the development of built environments is likely a fundamental, necessary component of any successful attempt to mitigate CO2 emissions.
