Comment by sbierwagen | Hacker News Reader

Comment by sbierwagen | Hacker News Reader

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>Environmentally friendly planning means you have housing near where people work to avoid highly polluting long commutes.

Vehicle miles driven doesn't make as big of a difference as one might expect. A paper[0] I saw linked on reddit had an interesting graph: https://imgur.com/a/n7u8fGH

In this paper, what carbon emissions you lose by not driving you gain from building emissions. Maybe because the study area was New York, with more fuel oil-heated buildings? Presumably, decarbonized heating and electricity generation would make a difference, but New York state already is pretty good by that metric: https://www.eia.gov/electricity/state/newyork/ (Though nowhere near carbon neutral, or carbon negative, as would be required for keeping global warming to 2C)

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0: Andrews, C. J. (2008). Greenhouse gas emissions along the rural-urban gradient. http://dx.doi.org/10.1080/09640560802423780 If you don't want to buy the PDF, then visit the crow site.

I think you missed the central point of this paper. It's true that there is an offsetting factor of building energy use vs. VMT, but the reality remains that denser environments, with jobs near residents, emit less per capita -- as that graph you linked to shows.

What's surprising is that at the other end of the spectrum, in rural (not sub-urban) areas, other factors (forests, etc.) combine to cause lower per-capita emissions than suburbs (and in some cases, negative per-capita emissions because of sequestration).

Basically, from a carbon-emissions perspective, post-war suburbs are unsurprisingly worst, rural areas get some help from sequestration in forests (this fact being the contribution of the paper), and dense urban environments are the least-emitting.

I think part of the problem of this graph is that it attributes commercial building emissions to the municipalities in which they are placed, even though these buildings might be used by residents and commuters alike.

So if you move into the city instead of commuting, you might be using the same commercial buildings a before, but their emissions are suddenly attributed to you.

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