Yule Heibel on 2009-03-10
- that's key.
This link has been bookmarked by 4 people . It was first bookmarked on 17 Feb 2009, by Eric Rice.
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13 Sep 09
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26 May 09
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10 Mar 09
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Yule HeibelEd Glaeser makes the point that cities are much greener than non-urban areas, all things considered. Your country or suburb carbon footprint is huge compared to your urban carbon footprint.
edward_glaeser city_journal urbanism green_strategies suburbs cities
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if you want to be good to the environment, stay away from it. Move to high-rise apartments surrounded by plenty of concrete. Americans who settle in leafy, low-density suburbs will leave a significantly deeper carbon footprint, it turns out, than Americans who live cheek by jowl in urban towers.
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second paradox follows from the first. When environmentalists resist new construction in their dense but environmentally friendly cities, they inadvertently ensure that it will take place somewhere else—somewhere with higher carbon emissions. Much local environmentalism, in short, is bad for the environment.
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Matthew Kahn, a professor of economics at UCLA, and I have quantified the first paradox.
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we’re trying to determine where future home construction would do the least environmental damage.
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In almost every metropolitan area, carbon emissions are significantly lower for people who live in central cities than for people who live in suburbs.
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New York City has the largest gap in emissions between central city and suburbs of any metropolitan area in the country—unsurprisingly, since New York’s central city is the epitome of dense urban living. Our estimate is that an average New York City resident emits 4,462 pounds less of transportation-related carbon dioxide than an average New York suburbanite. The reductions in carbon emissions from home heating and electricity are comparably large, thanks to New York’s famously tiny apartments. Manhattan is one of the greenest places in America.
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These four cities notwithstanding, the data suggest a strong general pattern: households in dense urban areas have significantly lower carbon emissions than households in the suburbs. The lifestyle that Thoreau preferred, living surrounded by green space, tends to be far less kind to the planet and far likelier to raise global temperatures, just as Thoreau himself did that afternoon in 1844.
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There is a large and growing literature, ranging from complete skepticism to ultra-alarmism, devoted to the question of just how much environmental damage is associated with carbon emissions. The widely cited Stern Review on the Economics of Climate Change claims that each ton of carbon dioxide emissions causes $85 worth of damage to the planet. More commonly accepted estimates are considerably lower; one meta-study suggests an average cost of about $15 per ton of carbon dioxide. The right number probably lies somewhere between $15 and $85.
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Even if, like many economists, you think that the Stern Review overstates the true damage per ton and you chop its proposed cost in half, then the average new home in Memphis still does about $620 worth of environmental harm per year more than an average new home in San Francisco, since San Francisco homes are associated with 14.65 fewer tons of carbon dioxide each year. Once you crunch the numbers, that makes the lifetime environmental cost of building in Memphis, rather than San Francisco, $12,400 per home—a big number relative to Memphis’s average housing price of $90,000.
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Before even considering carbon taxes, the country should rethink its land-use policies, which currently push people toward high-emissions areas and away from green ones.
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The chart shows a strong negative correlation between restrictiveness and carbon dioxide emissions.
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But California’s abundant restrictions on new construction don’t do much to deter building across America as a whole. No matter what the Bay Area does, plenty of new households will come into being, and they will need new homes. By restricting local development, California regulators just make sure that construction occurs someplace else. That someplace else tends to be a lot less environmentally friendly than the California coast, blessed as it is with a superbly temperate climate. The net result of this process: land-use restrictions in California increase carbon emissions and raise the risks of global warming.
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The great irony, of course, is that land-use regulations are so often justified by environmental arguments.
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So California environmentalists have things exactly backward. If climate change is the major environmental challenge that we face, the state should actively encourage new construction, rather than push it toward other areas. True, increasing development in California might increase per-household carbon emissions within the state if the new development, following the current model, took place on the extreme edges of urban areas. A better path would be to ease restrictions in the urban cores of San Francisco, San Jose, Los Angeles, and San Diego. More building there would reduce average commute lengths and improve per-capita emissions. Higher densities could also justify more investment in new, low-emissions energy plants.
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Similarly, limiting the height or growth of New York City skyscrapers incurs environmental costs. Building more apartments in Gotham will not only make the city more affordable; it will also reduce global warming.
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Thoreau was wrong. Living in the country is not the right way to care for the Earth. The best thing that we can do for the planet is build more skyscrapers.
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Yule Heibel on 2009-03-10
Best ending sentence, ever.
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