Super Polluters: Tackling the World’s Largest Sites of Climate-Disrupting Emissions (Society and the Environment)

Power plants are essential to achieving the standard of living that modern societies demand and the social and economic infrastructure on which they depend. Yet their indispensability has allowed them to evade responsibility for their vast carbon emissions. Fossil-fueled power plants are the single largest sites of anthropogenic greenhouse gases, making them one of the greatest threats to our planet’s climate. Significant as they are, we lack a comprehensive understanding of the social causes that enable power plant emissions and continue to delay their reduction. __Super Polluters__ offers a groundbreaking global analysis of carbon pollution caused by the generation of electricity, pinpointing who bears the most responsibility for the energy sector’s vast emissions and what can be done about them. The sociologists Don Grant, Andrew Jorgenson, and Wesley Longhofer analyze a novel dataset on the carbon dioxide emissions and structural attributes of thousands of fossil-fueled power plants around the world, identifying which plants discharge the most carbon. They investigate the global, organizational, and political conditions that explain these hyper-emitting facilities’ behavior and call into question the claim that improvements in technical efficiency will always reduce emissions. Grant, Jorgenson, and Longhofer demonstrate which energy and climate policies are most effective at abating power-plant pollution, emphasizing how mobilized citizen activism shapes those outcomes. A comprehensive account of who bears the blame for our warming planet, __Super Polluters__ points to more feasible and effective emission reduction strategies that target the world’s most profligate polluters. "Power plants are the lifeblood and bane of modern society. Electrification has revolutionized transportation and communication, dramatically improved medical care, spurred the rise of the metropolis, and enabled the global population to grow by over four billion during the past century. But because fossil fueled power plants are the largest source of human caused greenhouse gases, they also pose the single greatest threat to humans' life support system. Despite their pivotal role in society and projections that electricity generation will increase by 60% over the next two decades, however, there is little analysis of the causes and possible abatement of power plants' carbon pollution. Fortunately, as more scientists address the intersection of societies and their environments, especially in the context of climate change, they raise important questions about the distribution of pollution within sectors like electricity and have identified factors that may explain why certain actors within them do more environmental harm than others. These factors include technology, size, and age, but also their nation's position in the world economy, embeddedness in global environmental norms, political-legal systems, and the policies of their local governments. With Super Polluters, Don Grant, Andrew Jorgenson, and Wesley Longhofer present a novel data set on the CO2 emissions and structural attributes of nearly 20,000 fossil fuel power plants in 148 countries and information from the Environmental Protection Agency's Greenhouse Gas Reporting Program. They illustrate how social scientists can advance our understanding of the determinants and mitigation of individual power plants' carbon pollution"-- Provided by publisher