In my previous post, I noted how the US states of Wyoming and North Dakota rival the three super-rentier Gulf petromonarchies of Kuwait, Qatar and the United Arab Emirates as “super-polluters”. “Super-polluters” are political entities whose [extraction-based] greenhouse gas emissions per citizen are (roughly) at least 1½ orders of magnitude greater than the global average. Put plainly, citizens of super-polluters profit immensely from runaway global warming, via rents and/or job opportunities unavailable in states without these resources, and via not having to pay taxes.
What is strange when comparing the two sets of “super-polluters is that”:
- both groups have a very restricted number of local “citizens”, which accounts for the super-polluter status, but
- the Gulf petromonarchies have imported huge amounts of expatriate labour, but foreign labour is remarkably absent from the worst-polluting US states
- Wyoming and North Dakota have for many decades been amongst the bottom six US states in terms of proportion born outside the country, and this has not changed even with the oil boom and resultant glut that occurred in the 2010s.
- Moreover, Montana and West Virginia — two other very large polluters — are the very lowest two states by proportion born outside the US
- Alaska and New Mexico, two other great polluters (both among the most sui generis US states it should be emphasised), have larger proportions born overseas but these are still below to the US mean
In his landmark 2005 Sundown Towns, the late James Löwen noted that North Dakota — the second worst polluting state in the US today — was a sundown state for blacks during minimally the first two-thirds of the twentieth century. Census data from 1970 suggest the only place in the state a black family might live remotely safely was the military town of Minot. The exclusion of blacks in the rural Northwest was in fact so complete as to make research virtually impossible. The same is true of Montana, and marginally less so Wyoming, as can be seen below:
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| Counties with no or very few black households in 1970 mapped. Taken from https://www.census.gov/library/publications/1973/dec/population-volume-1.html. Note the huge area without black households in the Plains — and note that essentially all the rural Northwest was a sundown area for blacks. |
The explanation can, I think, be found in the 2007 thesis ‘Measuring Ancient Inequality’ by Branko Milanovic, Peter H. Lindert and Jeffrey G. Williamson. Although in a revised edition of the thesis that team says it is not likely that any society’s subsistence minimum can be lower than $PPP 300 [1990 US dollars] and that it is possible that in the most exploitative societies a proportion of the population could not afford the subsistence minimum, what is critical is how the team noted the likelihood of lower subsistence minima for tropical and subtropical climates compared to temperate zones. It is likely that in climates as cold as North Dakota’s, requiring extreme shelter, clothing and food, the subsistence minimum would be not merely greater than the $PPP 300 used in their second edition, but significantly greater than the $PPP 400 used by Angus Maddison in The World Economy: Historical Statistics. No society in so cold a climate is analysed and my earlier post aims to explain why finding one is naturally difficult if not impossible. Although the team implies that one needs to be cautious re differences in subsistence minima, it is logical and likely that the subsistence minimum in North Dakota, Wyoming or Montana would exceed $PPP 500 and could reach $PPP 600.
Th fact that bosses in Wyoming, Montana or North Dakota must provide workers a substantially higher subsistence income than in the Persian Gulf undoubtedly affects ruling class thought. Whereas in the Persian Gulf the ruling class brings in vast numbers of domestic and other low-skill workers, in the above-mentioned US states this would be too expensive as they require so much protection from frigid weather. Hence, the ruling classes of these cold super-polluters desire to completely exclude undesirable people — most especially and emphatically blacks — to limit the numbers of the lower class they must sustain at the elevated minimum. This, paradoxically, substantially lowers prices for those able to live in these regions below those of many hotter climates. Fewer buyers means less competition, so that buyers become more able to exert downward price pressure. This can be seen in how, despite the almost certain high subsistence minima, one’s dollar goes further in North Dakota than in Florida or Arizona.
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| Purchasing power of $100 in US states compared (2024). The subsistence minimum theory of Milanovic, Williamson and Lindert (2007, 2008) would predict a steady decrease the cooler the climate; however, historic sundown laws and related factors distort this |
The basic conclusion is that climate affects the social structure of super-polluting states greatly. Only when subsistence minima are sufficiently low will the wealthy use their wealth to invest in exploitative labour practices: otherwise they are more likely to simply exclude others from it.
