There are some 12,600 results in Google Scholar for a search on the "environmental Kuznets curve." Forty-seven of those results remain when the name Piketty is added to the search. As Thomas Piketty has written regarding the original, income inequality Kuznets curve:
"This theory has strong - and fairly optimistic - policy consequences: if > LDCs are patient enough and do not worry too much about the short run > social costs of development, then they should soon reach a world where > growth and inequality reduction go hand in hand, and where poverty rates > drop sharply." Piketty's verdict on the original Kuznets curve is that the data don't support the theory. The 1913-1948 time series Kuznets relied on didn't differentiate between labor income and capital income. The trend Kuznets found was entirely an artifact of shocks to capital income (World War I, the Depression, World War II). Some of those shocks were policy instruments such as high marginal tax rates. At any rate the decline in inequality began to reverse in the period after World War II. If the Kuznets curve doesn't describe the long-term effect of economic development on income inequality, what are the chances that it is still relevant to "ecological modernization"? -- Cheers, Tom Walker (Sandwichman)
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