Quality of Life and the Carbon Footprint: A Zip-Code Level Study Across the United States

• DOI: 10.1177/10704965211052130
• Author: Chad L. Smith,Matthew Thomas Clement,Tyler Leverenz
• Published date: 01 December 2021
• Date: 01 December 2021
• Subject Matter: Articles

Article

The Journal of Environment &

Development

2021, Vol. 30(4) 323–343

© The Author(s) 2021

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DOI: 10.1177/10704965211052130

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Quality of Life and the

Carbon Footprint: A

Zip-Code Level Study

Across the United States

Matthew Thomas Clement

1

, Chad L.

Smith

1

, and Tyler Leverenz

2

Abstract

Much sustainability scholarship has examined the environmental dimensions of sub-

jective and objective well-being. As an alternative measure of human well-being, we

consider the notion of quality of life and draw on a framework from the sustainability

literature to study its association with ecological impact, specif‌ically the carbon

footprint. We conduct a quantitative analysis, combining zip-code level data on quality

of life and the carbon footprint per household for the year 2012 across the continental

United States (n=29,953). Findings consistently show a signif‌icant, negative association

between quality of life and the carbon footprint. Our f‌indings point to the potential

advantages of utilizing robust objective measures of quality of life that extends beyond

economic well-being and life expectancy alone. Furthermore, our f‌indings question the

conventional wisdom that sustainability requires sacrif‌ices, while suggesting oppor-

tunities for how increased levels of sustainability may be achieved while retaining high

levels of quality of life.

Keywords

quality of life, subjective well-being, carbon footprint, spatial regression, zip code,

united states

1

Texas State University, San Marcos, TX, USA

2

Town of Flower Mound, Town of Flower Mound, USA

Corresponding Author:

Matthew Thomas Clement, Texas State University, 601 University Dr., San Marcos, TX, USA.

Email: mtc73@txstate.edu

Introduction

There is a long history of social science research examining the social drivers of

environmental impacts (e.g., Rees and Wackernagel 1996;Wackernagel and Yount

2000;York et al., 2003). Concurrent with this scholarship has also been an interest in

the cultural and social psychological implications of environmental change (e.g.,

Leiserowitz et al., 2006;Markowitz et al., 2012). Relatedly, environmental social

scientists and psychologists have been studying the subjective and material well-being

of individuals in the context of modern environmental change (e.g., Ambrey &

Daniels., 2017;Biedenweg 2017;Cloutier et al., 2014;Maibach et al., 2010;

Meijer and Van Beek 2011;Norgaard Kari, 2011). Indeed, there is much interest in the

connection between sustainability and subjective well-being (e.g., Ambrey & Daniels.,

2017;Cloutier et al., 2014;Helliwell 2014); some research indicates that people who

are happier tend to live in a more sustainable way (e.g., Brown et al., 2005) and that

there is broad support among the public for living more sustainably (e.g., Bowerman

2014). Meanwhile, in developed countries, like the United States, there is also

a commonly made argument that living more sustainably will require sacrif‌ices of life

quality, both subjective and material, and that people are unwilling to make these

sacrif‌ices, given that they might not think that environmental changes will affect them

personally (Forbes 2018; Hall et al., 2018;Oskamp 2000).

The quality of life literature as it relates to sustainability can be largely grouped into

two camps: those focusing upon subjective measures of well-being (e.g., happiness)

and those focusing on objective measures of well-being (e.g., life expectancy and gross

domestic product (GDP)). Much of the sustainability research on well-being focuses on

subjective well-being (e.g., Ambrey & Daniels., 2017;Cloutier et al., 2014) and in

general they f‌ind that sustainability is positively correlated with increases in subjective

well-being, while increased carbon intensity is inversely related to subjective well-

being. At the same time, there has been a considerable amount of research that focuses

upon objective well-being and sustainability or sustainable development (see Con-

stanza et al., 2007 for a review of this literature). Although there is some nuance to this

literature, most have argued that economic development, increases in GDP, are gen-

erally correlated with increases in quality of life as measured by health, social, and

economic outcomes. However, those same increases in objective quality of life out-

comes incur a cost in terms of sustainability (Dietz, Rosa, and York 2012;Jorgenson

2014). Although the former literature is more generally regarded as part and parcel of

the quality of life/well-being literature, we draw on this second line of research by

focusing on a unique means of measuring objective quality of life/well-being and

combining it with carbon footprint data to provide new insights into this relationship.

In the following analysis, we aim to make a contribution to this topic by making

a distinction between subjective well-being and quality of life and asking whether, at

the local level across the United States, there is a statistical association between quality

of life and a particular environmental impact: the carbon footprint. To answer this

question, with coverage for nearly all zip-codes across the contiguous United States (n

= 29,953), we integrate information from two primary data sets. First, from

324 The Journal of Environment & Development 30(4)