Documents Jorgenson, Andrew K. 4 results

"The climate crisis requires nations to achieve human well-being with low national levels of carbon emissions. Countries vary from one another dramatically in how effectively they convert resources into well-being, and some nations with low levels of emissions have relatively high objective and subjective well-being. We identify urgent research and policy agendas for four groups of countries with either low or high emissions and well-being indicators. Least studied are those with low well-being and high emissions. Understanding social and political barriers to switching from high-carbon to lower-carbon modes of production and consumption, and ways to overcome them, will be fundamental."

"This article provides a review of recent anthropological, archeological, geographical, and sociological research on anthropogenic drivers of climate change, with a particular focus on drivers of carbon emissions, mitigation and adaptation. The four disciplines emphasize cultural, economic, geographic, historical, political, and social‐structural factors to be important drivers of and responses to climate change. Each of these disciplines has unique perspectives and makes noteworthy contributions to our shared understanding of anthropogenic drivers, but they also complement one another and contribute to integrated, multidisciplinary frameworks. The article begins with discussions of research on temporal dimensions of human drivers of carbon emissions, highlighting interactions between long‐term and near‐term drivers. Next, descriptions of the disciplines' contributions to the understanding of mitigation and and adaptation are provided. It concludes with a summary of key lessons offered by the four disciplines as well as suggestions for future research."

"This study advances sociological research on the environmental impacts of working hours. Proponents of economic degrowth propose that a reduction in working time slows economic growth, which yields both social and environmental benefits. Building on such arguments, the authors conduct longitudinal analyses of the effects of average annual working hours on total energy consumption for samples of both developed and developing nations, and assess the extent to which the effect of working hours on energy consumption changes through time. The results suggest that the effect of working hours on energy consumption has increased through time, and this trend is observed for the samples of both developed and developing nations. The authors conclude by discussing the theoretical and policy implications of the findings."

"The well-established association between economic output and carbon emissions has led researchers in sociology and related disciplines to study new approaches to climate change mitigation, including policies that stabilize or reduce GDP growth. Within this degrowth approach, working time reduction is a key policy lever to reduce emissions as well as protect employment. In the United States, the abdication of responsibility for mitigation by the federal government has led to the emergence of state climate leadership. This study is the first to analyze the relationship between emissions and working hours at the state level. Our findings suggest that over the 2007–2013 period, state-level carbon emissions and average working hours have a strong, positive relationship, which holds across a variety of model estimation techniques and net of various political, economic, and demographic drivers of emissions. We conclude that working time reduction may represent a multiple dividend policy, contributing to enhanced quality of life and lower unemployment as well as emissions mitigation."