Greener? Trump Tower or Truffula Tree

In the wake of Earth Day (and Earth week) festivities, one more post for the files.  Edward Glaeser, Harvard economist, has been previously cited as a defender of sprawl and his papers have been proferred as “fact” as to why sprawl (which I believe should be read as single family housing) is superior to the alternative.   Mr. Glaeser is an occassional blog contributor on the New York Times Econmix blog and recently published this post about the phrase ”think globally, act locally” and dances around but never lands on the “N” word:

…The old mantra “think globally, act locally,” is pretty silly. Local environmentalism is often bad environmentalism, because keeping one’s backyard pristine can make the planet worse off…

In my own field of housing, a similar phenomenon occurs when some environmental groups put their own local interests ahead of global warming…

Homes in coastal California use much less energy than homes in most other places in the country. New building in California, as opposed to Texas, reduces America’s carbon emissions. Yet, instead of fighting to make it easier to build in California, environmentalists have played a significant role in stemming the growth of America’s greenest cities…

Environmentalists should, presumably, be out there lobbying for more homes in coastal California, but instead, for more than four decades, California environmental groups, such as Save the Bay, have fought new construction in the most temperate, lowest carbon-emission area of the country…

The local opponents of construction don’t have the ability to stop building in the United States as a whole, which hums along at roughly the rate of new household formation. When California’s anti-growth activists restrict building in California, then construction increases in  Atlanta,  Dallas and Houston. These three areas are both among the nation’s five most carbon-intensive living areas and among the four fastest-growing metropolitan areas. To be complete, California’s mandated environmental-impact reviews should ask not only about the impact on the local environment if a project proceeds, but also about the impact on global environment if the project is moved elsewhere.

Glaeser also goes on to talk a bit about charging farmers for the social cost of water in order to relieve California’s water burden, but that is going a bit too far I think.   As I said before, I don’t necessarily agree with everything Glaeser proposed, but some of this theories are facsinating.   I do think that the suggestion about our Environmental Impact Review process and that should be expanded beyond what  impact is locally is one that should be examined and would be more in line with the “thinking globally.”

As a footnote, Glaeser has an earlier post which discusses how Dr. Seuss’s Lorax, while traditionally held up as the environmentalist of the cautionary tale, some of the lessons in the story actually are not truly green:

…[T]he unfortunate aspect of the story is that urbanization comes off terribly. The forests are good; the factories are bad. Not only does the story disparage the remarkable benefits that came from the mass production of clothing in 19th-century textile towns, it sends exactly the wrong message on the environment. Contrary to the story’s implied message, living in cities is green, while living surrounded by forests is brown.

By building taller and taller buildings, the Once-ler was proving himself to be the real environmentalist.

…

In almost every metropolitan area, we found the central city residents emitted less carbon than the suburban counterparts. In New York and San Francisco, the average urban family emits more than two tons less carbon annually because it drives less. In Nashville, the city-suburb carbon gap due to driving is more than three tons. After all, density is the defining characteristic of cities. All that closeness means that people need to travel shorter distances, and that shows up clearly in the data…

But cars represent only one-third of the gap in carbon emissions between New Yorkers and their suburbanites. The gap in electricity usage between New York City and its suburbs is also about two tons. The gap in emissions from home heating is almost three tons. All told, we estimate a seven-ton difference in carbon emissions between the residents of Manhattan’s urban aeries and the good burghers of Westchester County. Living surrounded by concrete is actually pretty green. Living surrounded by trees is not…

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