COMPARATIVE ANALYSIS OF REGIONAL DECOUPLING PROCESS IN THE UNITED STATES AND THE EUROPEAN UNION

Today, climate change represents one of the biggest challenges for mankind. It is an indisputable fact that human action affects the climate of our planet. Most of this harmful effect stems from rapid economic growth that causes various external costs such as pollution, visible (smog) and less visible gas emissions (carbon dioxide), global warming and volatile weather, soil erosion, biodiversity loss, etc. Nevertheless, economic growth does not necessarily happen at the expense of the health of our planet. Namely, GDP growth is not always accompanied by higher levels of pollution. The situation in which economic growth occurs with a parallel reduction of the environmental pressure is called decoupling, and it is mostly observed in the world's most developed countries. Reduced environmental pressure stems from greater use of renewable energy sources, treatment of the environment as a public good, technological development, focusing on quality of life rather than GDP as a major indicator of economic development, etc. The United States of America (USA) and the European Union (EU) rank second and third on the list of largest polluters in the world after China (as measured as either by greenhouse gas emissions or by carbon dioxide emission). Although the trend of curbing greenhouse gas emissions is present in both the US and the EU at the national level, there are many differences at the regional level. Namely, in the EU, there is a visible trend of drastic reduction of greenhouse gas emissions, but this is not uniform across the EU. More developed EU member states have already gone through the process of energy transition, changing the structure of their energy system towards renewable energy sources and other forms of sustainable energy. A similar trend is visible in the United States, but without a clear link to the degree of economic development because regional inequalities among US states are less pronounced than in the EU. Therefore, the main goal of this paper is to analyse the regional patterns of the decoupling process in the USA and the EU. We calculate decoupling factors for individual states of the EU and the US and group them into regional clusters. Simply speaking, a decoupling factor is a measure of the pressures of economic growth on the environment. It usually has an environmental pressure variable for the numerator and an economic variable as the denominator. The higher the factor, the greater the environmental pressure. Our analyses show that the decoupling factor is decreasing in all subnational units of the United States and the European Union.