Guns versus Climate: How Militarization Amplifies the Effect of Economic Growth on Carbon Emissions

Abstract

Building on cornerstone traditions in historical sociology, as well as work in environmental sociology and political-economic sociology, we theorize and investigate with moderation analysis how and why national militaries shape the effect of economic growth on carbon pollution. Militaries exert a substantial influence on the production and consumption patterns of economies, and the environmental demands required to support their evolving infrastructure. As far-reaching and distinct characteristics of contemporary militarization, we suggest that both the size and capital intensiveness of the world’s militaries enlarge the effect of economic growth on nations’ carbon emissions. In particular, we posit that each increases the extent to which the other amplifies the effect of economic growth on carbon pollution. To test our arguments, we estimate longitudinal models of emissions for 106 nations from 1990 to 2016. Across various model specifications, robustness checks, a range of sensitivity analyses, and counterfactual analysis, the findings consistently support our propositions. Beyond advancing the environment and economic growth literature in sociology, this study makes significant contributions to sociological research on climate change and the climate crisis, and it underscores the importance of considering the military in scholarship across the discipline.

The Environmental State: Nature and the Politics of Environmental Protection

“…. societal-environmental interactions" (Duit et al 2016:6) but that provide no or minimal environmental welfare, such as developmental, agricultural, and war-related ministries and programs with local and global ecological effects, but that generally undermine long-term ecological sustainability (see Hooks and Smith 2004;Jorgenson et al 2023). 3 Moreover, we presume no unity or coherence between the environmental state and the state as a whole (Morgan and Orloff 2017).…”

“…As others have documented in detail, various elements of the state have long histories of supporting ecological degradation, environmental racism, and environmental injustice (Downey 2015;Pellow 2000Pellow , 2017, including elements of the environmental state itself (Cronon 1996;Jacoby 2001;Taylor 2016). Framed thus, tensions within the environmental state, for example, between conservation and environmental justice (Harrison 2019;Perkins 2022) or between the provision of environmental welfare and other state prerogatives, such as promoting economic growth or national security (Downey 2015;Hooks and Smith 2004;Jorgenson et al 2023), need not impede empirical study or foreclose the existence of environmental states as an analytic category. Instead, these intrastate tensions and incongruities become important features of the internal heterogeneity and endogenous politics of environmental states that need to be explained.…”

“…At the level of intranational comparison, any serious account must also be able to differentiate and specify relations between the environmental state and other elements of the nation-state, such as those providing military defense or social welfare-tensions and conflicts we gestured toward but did not substantially elaborate. Such investigations are essential for explaining how environmental considerations relate to other state prerogatives, including how considerations of environmental welfare are or are not taken up within a range of state activities, from housing policy to military operations to information and transportation infrastructure (Bunker and Ciccantell 2005;Hooks and Smith 2004;Jorgenson et al 2023). Environmental states, after all, encompass a range of policies, programs, and professionals that must integrate considerations of environmental welfare into all manner of activities, from environmental impact assessments to carbon accounting to requirements for various forms of ecological "mitigation" and "adaptation" wherever state-sanctioned activity generates environmental harm.…”

“…A large literature, for example, connects state-supported capitalist accumulation to planetary ecological harm (Bunker and Ciccantell 2005;Foster and Clark 2020;Jorgenson 2014;Moore 2015;Rudel, Roberts, and Carmin 2011;Schnaiberg 1980;York, Rosa, and Dietz 2003). A handful of scholars have interrogated the ways the state's broad military prerogatives exact both socially unjust and ecologically destructive outcomes (Downey 2015;Hooks and Smith 2004;Jorgenson et al 2023;Lengefeld, Hooks, and Smith 2021).…”

“…Recognizing the centrality of states to environmental questions, scholars of environmental politics and environmental problems, such as climate change (Jorgenson et al 2023) and environmental justice (Harrison 2019), have begun to integrate environmental-sociological theories of society-environment relations and political-sociological theories of the state. This article embraces these efforts and pushes them forward by offering a new theorization of the environmental state.…”