The Antiplanner remains a skeptic of climate change not because of the evidence for or against it but because so many of its adherents are eagerly using it to impose their preconceived prescriptions for how people should live. The latest is an article in the Guardian claiming that urban densification is “one of the most impactful ways to slash greenhouse gas emissions.” If it weren’t for evil NIMBYs, the article implies, the world would be well on its way to ending carbon emissions.
This is, of course, total and complete garbage, as I showed in a Cato paper nearly 12 years ago. Claims that denser lifestyles emit fewer greenhouse gases ignore the self-selection issue (people who want to drive less choose to live in denser areas); the congestion issue (people who live in dense cities may drive less, but they drive in greater congestion and therefore end up burning as much or more fuel as people living in low-density suburbs); and the construction issue (greenhouse gas emissions from building multi-story housing are much greater than one- and two-story housing).
Beyond that, the viability of a plan that depends on completely changing the lifestyles of hundreds of millions if not billions of people is highly questionable. Finally, consider the alternatives: for the same effort, we can save more emissions by making more fuel-efficient cars than by trying to get people to stop driving and by building more energy-efficient single-family homes than by trying to get people to live in multifamily housing. Continue reading
