The Counterintuitive Relationship between Globalization and Climate Change

J. Samuel Barkin

Global Environmental Politics, 2003, vol. 3, issue 3, 8-13

Abstract: Scholars and activists are concerned, sometimes simultaneously, with mitigation of anthropogenic climate change and the environmental effects of globalization. Many analysts argue that a solution to both problems is localization; increasing the costs of transportation should increase the cost of long-distance transportation, making local and regional exchange economically relatively more efficient. The argument here, however, is that dealing with climate change will have the effect of reinforcing patterns of economic globalization, at the expense of patterns of economic nationalization and continentalization. Transportation by sea has historically been, and continues to be, more fuel-efficient than transportation by land. Limiting anthropogenic carbon emissions in transportation therefore favors sea transport over land transport. Historically, patterns of trade favored global seaborne trade routes over trade within land-based regions. The model to look in understanding the effect of action on climate change on global trade pattens, therefore, is not the future proposed by the localists, it is at historical patterns. Copyright (c) 2003 Massachusetts Institute of Technology.

Date: 2003
References: Add references at CitEc
Citations: View citations in EconPapers (3)

Downloads: (external link)
http://www.mitpressjournals.org/doi/pdfplus/10.1162/152638003322469259 link to full text (text/html)
Access to full text is restricted to subscribers.

Related works:
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:tpr:glenvp:v:3:y:2003:i:3:p:8-13

Ordering information: This journal article can be ordered from
https://mitpressjour ... rnal/?issn=1526-3800

Access Statistics for this article

Global Environmental Politics is currently edited by Steven Bernstein, Matthew Hoffmann and Erika Weinthal

More articles in Global Environmental Politics from MIT Press
Bibliographic data for series maintained by The MIT Press ().