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.
None of these issues or possibilities are considered by the Guardian article, which is more of an opinion piece than a reporting of facts. The reporters have already decided they want denser cities; climate change is just an excuse.
The first proposal for denser cities can be traced back to at least 1933, when Swiss architect Le Corbusier‘s book, Radiant City, argued that all urban residents should live in identical high rises. Climate change had nothing to do with it; Le Corbusier just thought that scores of monotonous high rises separated by green spaces and broad highways would provide a “better lifestyle” for urban residents.
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No matter what the problem — obesity, teenage suicide, decline of social capital — some urban planner has proposed density as the solution even when the data show quite the opposite. The need to prevent climate change has just become the latest excuse for totally upending American cities and lifestyles.
The densifiers have to face the reality that the forces of decentralization greatly outweigh their imperative to centralize. The latest such force, of course, is the pandemic, but before that we already had increasing auto ownership, expanding cell phone networks, greater numbers of people working at home, and the ability to order just about anything you want shipped to your door no matter where you live, at least in the developed world.
Densification is difficult to implement not because of NIMBYs but because most people just don’t want to live that way. If they did, then cities like Seattle, Portland, Oakland, and San Jose wouldn’t need to draw urban-growth boundaries to keep developers from building single-family homes.
In central Oregon, we didn’t have much snow last winter and we had a huge heat wave this summer. Does that mean human-caused climate change is real? I don’t know, but I’ll buy an electric car and install solar cells on my house before I move to stack-and-pack housing in Portland. In doing so I would do far more to reduce my carbon footprint than by living in a dense city.
One of the most impactful ways to slash greenhouse gas emissions is for other countries to start fracking for natural gas, as the United States did more than ten years ago:
Another, longer-term way to dramatically slash greenhouse gas emissions is to start building nuclear power plants, as France did 40 years ago.
Just a note that Le Corbusier apparently never lived in one of his high rise structures. https://www.dezeen.com/2018/11/07/le-corbusier-paris-apartment-home-immeuble-molitor-refurbishment/
I have also found that most density advocates also don’t live in high density, but single family homes. Any policy based on such hypocrisy is doomed to failure.
Density is a pet subject of environmentalists, who argue that densely populated cities are the solution to lower the energy requirements for transportation. On the other hand the energy needs to build such density from materials involved (Steel, concrete, etc) begs the question how efficient is it.
Energy efficiency is a rate of energy consumed divided by work performed. the solar envelope shows that above a certain treshold, density can also raise energy requirements, in particular those of heating, cooling and daylighting buildings.
This means that it would probably be wise to aim for a compromise. If we would take the highest densities reached under the solar envelope as an upper limit, we could create cities where the critical functions of buildings can be met without fossil fuels, while still retaining (more than) high enough densities to make public transportation, bicycling and walking attractive. IF people willing.
“Freedom and mobility” occur where energy is cheap. Where energy is expensive, mobility takes a backseat to design practicalities. Nobody comes back from a trip to Italy or Paris complaining that the hill towns all looked the same. The urbanism Tuscany or Paris is so rigorous that the casual observer could easily mistake one villa for another, however no environmentalist ever came home from Paris complaining that the streets all looked too much the same or not enough trees. The problem which is common US urban daily environments is not that they are too uniform, but that they are of uniformly miserable quality.
We don’t need a suburban sprawl repair kit or a total overhaul, just hire those who care…. Care, concern, attention to detail….those aren’t trainable skills, they’re mindsets. People with those mindsets do well in services that benefit the public. People without them……go into politics.
So we have two options,
1: operate on a system where energy prices is dictated by geopolitical fuckupitude. Whereby we may Watch said system possibly/inevitably collapse because of over exertion of money/manpower to maintain it.
2: Start a new energy system (Nuclear), may carry some risk, but offers geopolitical isolation. Unlike Oil and gas……uranium cannot be OPEC-ified.
Hydrocarbons will still be used as feedstock for other industries.
You can take coal and thru fischer tropsch convert it to synthetic aviation fuel. One reason the Luftwaffe almost kicked our asses in WWII, they used synthetic fuels instead of refined petroleum and it had a 10% greater power density. Thats when we came up with ethyl fuel. We could turn coal from the filthiest fuel on the planet into sulfur free; and turn 50 dollar a ton junk into 1800 dollar per ton jet fuel and turn coal country into the aviation fuel capital of the nation. And the sulfur rather than go in the atmosphere; Sulfur has thousands of industrial uses.Besides that coal ash that cement companies would kill for. Coal and coal ash is also a concentrated source of rare earths……..which hold key for extraction using heat without the ENORMOUS toxic waste profile of mining and processing them.
All in all, and here’s where your public policies start to come in; you’re talking about disrupting a 72 TRILLION dollar supply chain market that was heavily dependent on fossil fuels to power most of these industries. Once you can start to not only decarbonize but de-politicize your economy and means of production you can do some amazing things in the geo-poltical spectrum. You have countries where 80-95+ percent of their income, GDP come from petroleum and petroleum distillates; beyond simply meeting those industrial needs mentioned above, not to mention their domestic energy use. Beside the fact they’re not particularly Western world friendly; Some, they’re sponsors of terrorism the world over; Petroleum and petro dollars constitute the bulk of their political power…..And some strange things are gonna start to happen to those societies when their not needed anymore.
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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.
” ~anti-planner
We should apply this principle to other scientific questions:
“The Antiplanner remains a skeptic of a spherical earth 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 Antiplanner remains a skeptic of a heliocentric solar system 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 AntiPlanner is spot on in his observations about the climate change industry. It’s become a religion selling indulgences to gain entry into a utopian, Goldilocks earth climate stasis that has never existed but with the actual goal of moving wealth from regular people to the politically powerful elite:
CapitalistRoader, hope the smoke from the forest fires isn’t too bad where you are. Weird how we’ve had so many of them in the past year. Great to see some insight into global warming from noted climate scientist Dwight Eisenhower.
Actually, janehavisham, it isn’t particularly weird that we’ve had so many wildfires in the past year, considering that forest fires consumed four times as many acres each year in the much hotter and drier early- to mid-1930s.
Would you prefer I receive insight into climate science from noted climate scientist Al Gore? Did he become an expert in climate science studying for his sole college degree, a bachelor’s degree in journalism?