The Counterintuitive Relationship between Globalization and Climate Change

摘要

Two common themes in the contemporary discussion of global environmental politics are the need to deal with the causes of anthropogenic climate change and the environmental effects of globalization. Dealing with the causes of climate change will require decreasing the use of fossil fuels, and many analysts argue that the best way to do this is to increase their cost. This would in turn have the effect of increasing the cost of transportation, and therefore the costs of trade. With respect to the environmental effects of globalization, there is a school of thought within the study of the political economy of ecology that argues that globalization is a significant contributing factor to environmental degradation. The solution proposed by many who subscribe to this school is localization, a rearranging of patterns of economic interaction that promotes economic interaction regionally rather than globally. At first glance, these two themes seem mutually compatible. Increasing the costs of transportation should increase the cost of long-distance transportation, making local and regional exchange economically relatively more efficient. But this mutual compatibility breaks down upon closer examination. Increasing fuel prices raises the cost of transportation, but does not do so equally across different modes of transportation, because some modes are much more fuel-intensive than others. Transportation by sea has historically been, and continues to be, more fuel-efficient than transportation by land. Increasing fuel costs therefore favor sea transport over land transport. In order to understand what a future of higher transportation costs might look like, therefore, the model to look at is not the future proposed by the localists, it is the past, when transportation costs were higher than they are now. In the past, patterns of trade favored global seaborne trade routes over trade within land-based regions.