Climate Benefits of Air Quality Regulation

Overview

This is the repository for a project estimating the causal effect of the EPA's National Ambient Air Quality Standards (NAAQS) for PM2.5 level on transporation-related CO2 emissions in U.S. The project applies CausalArima (Menchetti et al., 2021) on EIA data on total transportation-sector CO2 emissions in the U.S. (1960-2023) as well as aggregated NASA data on on-road CO2 emissions at the county level in the contiguous U.S. (1980-2017). The preliminary results look promising.

Repository Structure

• data: This folder contains the "raw" data (downloaded online, internal to NSAPH, etc.) used in the analysis. If publicly available, the data sets are cited via links in footnotes.
  • Due to size constraints, the CMS_DARTE_V2_1735 (on-road CO2 emissions) and dataverse_files (PM2.5 concentrations) data sets are not included in this repository.
  • For CMS_DARTE_V2_1735, see source or Google Drive.
  • For dataverse_files, see source or Google Drive.
• files: This folder contains the files (.Rmd and .pdf) with the code and documentation.
  • aggregation: This file aggregates data on PM2.5 concentration in the U.S. from the ZCTA level to the census block group level to join with the NASA data.
  • final_county: This file performs causal inference at the county level. It first cleans the NASA data (outputting co2_county.csv) and then runs CausalArima on one specified county. Finally, with co2_county_causal_arima.csv from run_causal_arima.R, it plots the results of significant counties on a map of the U.S.
  • final_national: This file performs causal inference at the national level. It first cleans the EIA data along with data on multiple potential covariates (outputting national.csv) and then runs CausalArima using U.S. trade/GDP ratio, real GDP on a log scale, and urban population ratio as covariates.
  • run_causal_arima: This file runs CausalArima iteratively through every available county in the contiguous U.S. (with co2_county.csv from final_county.Rmd) and outputs co2_county_causal_arima.csv.
• plots: This folder contains the important visualizations generated in the files.
• results: This folder contains the important data sets generated, processed, and used in the files.