Decomposing Trends in U.S. Air Pollution Disparities from Electricity

Danae Hernandez-Cortes, Kyle Meng and Paige E. Weber

No 30198, NBER Working Papers from National Bureau of Economic Research, Inc

Abstract: This paper quantifies and decomposes recent trends in U.S. PM2.5 disparities from the electricity sector using a high-resolution pollution transport model. Between 2000-2018, PM2.5 concentrations from electricity fell by 89% for the average individual, more than double the decline rate in overall U.S. ambient PM2.5 concentrations. Across racial/ethnic groups, we detect a dramatic convergence: since 2000, the Black-White PM2.5 disparity from electricity has narrowed by 95% and the Hispanic-White PM2.5 disparity has narrowed by 93%, though these disparities still exist in 2018. A decomposition reveals nearly all of these disparity trends can be attributed roughly equally to improvements in emissions intensities and compositional changes in electric generators, with small contributions from scale and residential location changes. This suggests both local air pollution policies and recent coal-to-natural gas fuel switching have played major roles in reducing U.S. racial/ethnic pollution disparities from electricity. While we detect similarly large PM2.5 improvements for the average low and high income individual, PM2.5 disparities by income are relatively small, with little change over time.

JEL-codes: H4 I14 Q5 Q51 Q52 Q53 Q54 (search for similar items in EconPapers)
Date: 2022-07
New Economics Papers: this item is included in nep-ene and nep-env
Note: EEE
References: Add references at CitEc
Citations:

Downloads: (external link)
http://www.nber.org/papers/w30198.pdf (application/pdf)

Related works:
Chapter: Decomposing Trends in US Air Pollution Disparities from Electricity (2022)
This item may be available elsewhere in EconPapers: Search for items with the same title.

Export reference: BibTeX RIS (EndNote, ProCite, RefMan) HTML/Text

Persistent link: https://EconPapers.repec.org/RePEc:nbr:nberwo:30198

Ordering information: This working paper can be ordered from
http://www.nber.org/papers/w30198

Access Statistics for this paper

More papers in NBER Working Papers from National Bureau of Economic Research, Inc National Bureau of Economic Research, 1050 Massachusetts Avenue Cambridge, MA 02138, U.S.A.. Contact information at EDIRC.
Bibliographic data for series maintained by ().