News from a Changing Planet -- #6
This is about the small things.
Usually, when we talk about climate policy, we start with the big things -- net zero electricity generation and an entirely electric fleet of vehicles. It’s important to do this -- we need vision and aspiration and transformation if we’re going to preserve any semblance of planetary stability. But there are a lot of changes that we can make now that don’t necessarily seem to have that much to do with climate policy but could meaningfully reduce emissions. One of those things is housing regulation. Like most people I imagine, I think a lot about zoning and density, which have a lot to do with climate and equity, as it turns out. Let’s start with density. Lots of residential areas are zoned for single-family housing, which, in the U.S., even in cities, is often more common than multi-family dwellings. In the U.S., about 84 percent of the population lives in metropolitan areas with more than half living in the suburbs, which are lower-density than the cities they surround. Unfortunately, low-density development has 2.5 times the greenhouse gas emissions and twice the energy use of high-density development per capita each year. So low-density housing is not good when it comes to emissions. But it’s also not good when it comes to sprawl. The rate of development -- changing agricultural or undeveloped land (like forests) to urban or suburban land -- is going up: urban land area in the U.S. increased by 15 percent from 2000 to 2010. That land, if it’s paved over, can no longer sequester carbon dioxide at all or as effectively, possibly further raising emissions. Total urban land area in the US is expected to triple from 2000 to 2050. Plus, land next to cities can be important for keeping a city’s water supply clean or for agriculture or because it’s not always great to pave over every square inch of land just because we can and also concrete production accounts for about 4 percent of the worlds’ greenhouse gas emissions.
(Not to mention that sprawl is more expensive. According to a 2011 report from Smart Growth America, high-density development costs about 38 percent less in terms of infrastructure -- roads, sewers, water lines, for example -- than suburban development. It also reduces costs of services by decreasing the distances people have to drive -- law enforcement, garbage trucks, etc. And, high-density development brings in about 10 times more tax revenue per acre. And it's more expensive for the people who live there: more time in the car, so more money spent on cars and gas, more time in the car, etc.) We see the problems with low-density and sprawl in the California wildfire crisis. As populations grow, cities and other municipalities need more housing, so they build more housing possibly in areas next to forests, putting those houses (and others nearby) at risk. It also makes it more difficult for those managing state and federal forests to implement some important management tools, like prescribed burning, since those forests might now be in the middle of a neighborhood. That means there is more dry and dead wood to burn, and as climate change makes California hotter and drier, wildfires become more intense and more frequent, and this kind of management doesn’t help. The other problem, which is not unrelated, is that residential and commercial areas are usually not in the same place (by zoning design). In lots of places, including cities, that means that people can’t live and work in the same place, which means that they will depend on some kind of transportation to get between those two places. Unless cities start massively expanding public transportation options, personal car ownership is pretty much baked in. (Gentrification adds further to these problems -- people can’t afford to live and work in the same city.) In a time of internal combustion engines, that’s building in a reliance on fossil fuels. In an age of electric cars, that’s building in a reliance on lithium, graphite, cobalt, and electricity. In general, it means more individual consumption rather than collective ownership of infrastructure and transportation systems. People are trying: Oregon’s legislature passed a single-family zoning ban in cities with more than 25,000 residents; Seattle passed a housing plan in 27 neighborhoods that allows for developers to build larger buildings (higher-density) provided that they also build affordable housing or pay into the city’s affordable housing fund. So it’s about the little things. Because the little things will add up. And because living in a world that is trying to get to net-zero emissions and then stay there requires a lot of planning. In the rest of the world, it might matter even more. The urban population is currently growing by about 1.5 million people every week. Between now and 2050, the global population will grow by about 2.5 billion people. More than half of those people will live in cities, and about ⅔ of the urban areas that will exist by 2050 don’t exist yet, meaning that cities will develop and expand profoundly over the next few decades. A third of the new urban population growth will be in three countries: India, Nigeria, and China. It’s almost impossible to imagine. So take all of the problems that urban development represents in the U.S., and extrapolate it to the entire planet. Add in a population of around 10 billion people who will need a lot more food, while also factoring in that a lot of the land traditionally used to grow food will now have been taken over by urban development. And we’ll need a lot more concrete to build housing and roads for these new urban areas. It’s overwhelming. It’s the kind of big problem that we need to plan for, and a big problem that we can address by starting now, starting with the little things.
-------------------------------------------------------------- Here’s what else I’m reading: I have been doing a deep dive on utilities! Who’s with me?! Batteries were increasing emissions. California fixed it! E&E News (essential reading always!) is doing a series on the most pivotal environment and energy events of the last decade. The Crop Trust, an international seed bank, released a new report: scientists have collected more than 4,600 seed samples of 371 wild relatives of key domesticated crops from all over the world Why? Because these wild varieties may go extinct, and we’ve planted our crops in such monocultures that they are increasingly vulnerable to pests, disease, and weather. Stumped by what to buy all the most important people in your life for the holidays? I recommend this book. Tell me what you'd like to read about, or ask me any questions you have! I'd love to hear from you. Order your copy (or audiobook! read by me!) of Inconspicuous Consumption: The Environmental Impact You Don't Know You Have. Find more of my work here.