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Abstract Will power plants emit less or more CO2 in anticipation of stronger climate policies that would strand fossil fuel reserves? Here, using a worldwide data source on individual power plants’ CO2 emissions and the value of countries’ at-risk fossil fuel assets, we show that between 2009 and 2018, plants emitted more CO2 in countries where more assets would be devalued under a 1.5 °C scenario, which we theorize is due to these countries’ regulatory leniency and plants’ vested interest in long-term fossil fuel contracts. Although the extra amount of carbon emitted each year trigged by imperiled assets is relatively small, it would exhaust a sizable portion of the electricity sector’s remaining carbon budget when added up over time. This is especially true in the U.S. and Russia where up to 16% and 12% of their budgets, respectively, could be spent within ten years due solely to the stranded asset effect.

Abstract Transnational municipal networks (TMNs) have been heralded as actors that can avert a climate catastrophe by filling the “emission gaps” left by national climate policies. But can these networks reduce the carbon pollution of power plants, the world’s largest sites of climate-disrupting emissions? Using an international data source on individual power plants, we empirically analyze this issue. Findings reveal that after accounting for their structural properties and the national policies to which they are subject, power plants emit less CO2 when nested in cities that are members of TMNs and this is especially true of plants in less developed countries. In contrast, national climate policies are unrelated to plants’ environmental performance over time. Although our analyses suggest TMNs help to reduce the emissions of the typical power plant, they also indicate they have little bearing on the emissions of the world’s most egregious polluting plants.

Climate change is arguably the greatest threat to society as power plants, the single largest human source of heat-trapping pollution, continue to emit massive amounts of carbon into the atmosphere. Sociologists have identified several possible structural determinants of electricity-based CO2 emissions, including international trade and global normative regimes, national political–legal systems, and organizational size and age. But because they treat these factors as competing predictors, scholars have yet to examine how they might work together to explain why some power plants emit vastly more pollutants than others. Using a worldwide data set of utility facilities and fuzzy-set methods, we analyze the conjoint effects of global, political, and organizational conditions on fossil-fueled plants' CO2 emissions. Findings reveal that hyperpolluters' emission rates are a function of four distinct causal recipes, which we label coercive, quiescent, expropriative, and inertial configurations, and these same sets of conditions also increase plants' emission levels.

Combusting fossil fuels to produce electricity is the single largest contributor to sector-level, anthropogenic carbon pollution. Because sector-wide policies are often too unwieldy to implement, however, some researchers have recommended reducing electricity-based CO _2 emissions by targeting the most extreme emitters of each nation’s electricity industry. Here, we use a unique international data source to measure national disproportionalities in power plant CO _2 emissions and estimate the fraction of each country’s electricity-based CO _2 emissions that would be reduced if its most profligate polluters lowered their emission intensities, switched to gas fuels, and incorporated carbon capture and storage systems. We find that countries’ disproportionalities vary greatly and have mostly grown over time. We also find that 17%–49% of the world’s CO _2 emissions from electricity generation could be eliminated depending on the intensity standards, fuels, or carbon capture technologies adopted by hyper-emitting plants. This suggests that policies aimed at improving the environmental performance of ‘super polluters’ are effective strategies for transitioning to decarbonized energy systems.

The combustion of fossil fuels for electricity generation, which accounts for a significant share of the world’s CO _2 emissions, varies by macro-regional context. Here we use multilevel regression modeling techniques to analyze CO _2 emissions levels in the year 2009 for 1360 fossil-fuel power plants in the 25 post-Soviet transition nations in Central and Eastern Europe and Eurasia. We find that various facility-level factors are positively associated with plant-level emissions, including plant size, age, heat rate, capacity utilization rate, and coal as the primary fuel source. Results further indicate that plant-level emissions are lower, on average, in the transition nations that joined the European Union (EU), whose market reforms and environmental directives are relevant for emissions reductions. These negative associations between plant-level emissions and EU accession are larger for the nations that joined the EU in 2004 relative to those that joined in 2007. The findings also suggest that export-oriented development is positively associated with plant-level CO _2 emissions in the transition nations. Our results highlight the importance in macro-regional assessments of the conjoint effects of political and economic integration for facility-level emissions.