Emily Badger

Sprawl and climate don’t mix

Contributing writer - The Atlantic Cities, Miller-McCune, GOOD, The Christian Science Monitor, & New York Times, Dec 13, 11.

Tagged with sprawl, climate change, urbanism, waste

Researchers from the Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory recently published a projection in the journal Science of what it would take for California, by 2050, to reach the state’s goal of cutting greenhouse gas emissions to 80 percent below 1990 levels. Their vision would make any environmentalist swoon: They see workers locking the door to their net-zero homes, hopping in battery-powered cars, then heading to uber-efficient offices powered by solar panels.

In the methodical build-up to this world, first buildings, lighting and appliances become more energy efficient. Then the energy sector shifts wholesale to renewable and cleaner sources. Then vehicles and heaters that today run on fuel will become electrified.

This vision sounds great, if not technically daunting. But it falls prey to a common assumption about how we’re going to address climate change: that we have to do it all with technology.

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It doesn’t solve the problem to buy a hybrid and retrofit your house if all of that takes place 20 miles from your job. You’d still consume more energy (“suburban single family green”) than an urban household without the latest green tech (“urban single family”). And that has as much to do with associated transportation emissions as the size and efficiency of your home.

The implication is that if more suburbanites opted to move out of their low-density detached homes and into walkable, mixed-use urban communities (or if we retrofitted suburbia to better resemble such places), right there we’d be on our way to taking a real whack at carbon emissions.

We’d still need to increase the fuel standards of cars, and change the makeup of fuel itself. But what if we could also simply reduce the miles people drive by in a sense pushing their many destinations closer together?

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This messy approach, though, has several things going for it that technological solutions to climate change don’t. For one, urbanizing communities comes with a whole host of co-benefits: it saves people money on utility bills, it improves public health, it reduces congestion and improves air quality, and it may even make communities happier (as walkability has been shown to do).

The need to shift to low-carbon, denser living also parallels where the market is heading anyway. There’s no need to forcibly decamp suburbanites for inner-city condos. People are doing this anyway, with demand in particular growing for housing located near transit.

“I wish that 30-50 percent of people wanted to drive a hybrid, but that’s not whatever the couple-percent penetration is now,” Winkelman says. Many more people do, however, want to live in low-carbon communities (although most of them don’t put it that way). “Right here,” Winkelman says, “it’s clear that there’s unmet market demand.”

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“There’s a lot of built cities that basically are not going to be able to change, and you have to do technological change,” says John Fregonese, a veteran planner based in Portland. “But that being said, this is important. If you’re going to live in a situation where energy use and carbon emissions are going to be important and something you want to reduce, the kind of community you build is really important.”

Like Calthorpe, Fregonese has been peddling this message to cities and states that now want to begin crafting master plans for regional land use decades into the future. California, Oregon, and Washington state are all at the forefront of this, as is, surprisingly, more conservative Utah. Communities there are beginning to get the connection between housing style, location, associated transportation and carbon emissions.

“On the other hand, when we were working in Texas, we mentioned to one city that I won’t name that this downtown plan would reduce their greenhouse gas emissions by 20 percent,” Fregonese says. “And they said, ‘Don’t mention that, just don’t bring that up. Tell people they’re saving money.’”