Divergence in State-Level Per Capita Carbon Dioxide Emissions

Decisionmakers considering policies to mitigate climate change will benefit from information about current and future distributions of carbon dioxide (CO2) emissions. Examining the emissions dynamics of advanced economies that have experienced income convergence could provide insights about how distributions of country-level emissions may evolve over time if country-level incomes eventually undergo some convergence. This paper addresses the question of whether income convergence is sufficient for per capita CO2 emissions convergence by focusing on a set of advanced economies, the U.S. states. I undertake a variety of cross-sectional and stochastic convergence tests with two novel measures of 1960–1999 state-level CO2 emissions per capita—production (pre-electricity trade) CO2 and consumption (post-electricity trade) CO2—and with income per capita. Although incomes continue to converge, I find stark divergence in production CO2 per capita and no evidence of convergence for consumption CO2 per capita. Forecasts of future distributions show little convergence in emissions.