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It Won’t Do Any Good, But Let’s Do It Anyway

By | | News commentary
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Oregon has a plan to reduce greenhouse gas emissions by forcing electric companies to stop burning coal and to get half their energy from renewable resources. It sounds like a great plan, but like so many government plans, it has a few flaws.

First, it won’t reduce greenhouse gas emissions. Second, it will increase energy prices, thus reducing the viability of Oregon’s economy.

At least, that’s the conclusion of Oregon’s Public Utility Commission, the three-member board that is supposed to regulate electric utilities. The only problem is that the commission was never consulted about the energy plan, suggesting that the state is listening only to groups who are already true believers.

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What Is Your Sin?

By | | Transportation
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Over at Green Car Reports, the “guide to cleaner, greener driving,” electric car advocate David Noland asks, “Which sins worse: cars or planes?” The “sin,” of course, is carbon emissions, and his answer, while interesting, is flawed in many respects.

“The passenger jet blows away the automobile in terms of efficiency and CO2 emissions per mile,” he says, a result he apparently considers surprising. But it’s not surprising at all to anyone familiar with the Department of Energy’s Transportation Energy Data Book. According to tables in the book, airlines emitted about 2,568 grams of carbon per passenger mile in 2013, while the average car emitted 3,144 grams (or 3,564 if SUVs and other light trucks are included).

But it’s not enough to show that both cars and airlines have been rapidly improving their energy efficiency. Noland wants to really blow cars out of contention, so he biases his analysis in several ways.

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Reducing Greenhouse Gas Emissions

By | | Regional planning
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When the Antiplanner read the headline–“Suburban sprawl cancels carbon-footprint savings of dense urban cores”–I thought this was going to be just another smart-growth study. But the study by University of California (Berkeley) researchers actually makes some good points.

People living in dense centers of large urban areas tend to have low carbon footprints. But those dense centers are invariably surrounded by low-density suburbs, as if dense areas cannot exist in isolation from low-density areas. (The reverse isn’t true: some low-density areas, such as Phoenix and San Jose, have no dense centers.)

So is the solution to increase suburban densities, as smart-growth advocates claim? Nope. “Increasing population density in suburbs is even more problematic,” says one of the researchers. “Surprisingly, population dense suburbs have significantly higher carbon footprints than less dense suburbs, due largely to higher incomes and resulting consumption.” I was wondering when someone else would notice that: density increases land prices which makes housing less affordable for low-income people. Moreover, those dense suburbs themselves are surrounded by lower-density suburbs of their own.

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