Clarity Blog

If America’s greenest metro areas are in California, why do environmentalists make it so hard to build here?

The answer may benefit your project.

It may come as a surprise to you, but you’ve probably been indoctrinated by the environmental movement. Don’t think so? Well, just answer this question: Is LA – sprawling, smoggy, freeway crisscrossed LA – a “green” city or a “brown” city?

If you answered “brown,” you’re wrong. It turns out that Los Angeles is the fourth greenest metropolitan area in the country. Why’s that? Because the climate here is temperate, so LA’s carbon footprint for air conditioning is less than Atlanta’s or Houston’s, and its footprint for heating is smaller than that of Minneapolis or Chicago. So says a study by Edward Glaeser and Matthew Kahn, UCLA and Harvard profs respectively.

Not only is LA green, but so are all of California’s other major metropolitan areas. In fact, the five greenest metros (based on per-home carbon emissions) in the whole USA are in the Golden State. San Francisco is the greenest, followed by San Jose, San Diego, LA and Sacramento. The metro area with the highest per-home carbon emissions is Houston, followed by Oklahoma City, Memphis, Dallas and Atlanta.

The average San Francisco home emits 38,000 pounds of CO2 a year, compared to 68,000 pounds from the average Houston home. Despite this, California’s very effective no-growth and environmental movements have deprived the planet of the benefits of our comparative greenness. On average, California’s green metro areas grew only 4.7 percent since 2000, while the five brown towns grew by a whopping 8.8 percent – and the brownest of them all, Houston, grew by 11 percent.

In a column in the NY Times, Glaeser makes the key point:

“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.”

How This Can Benefit Your Project

You know what they say: Think Globally, Act Locally.

Thinking globally, if environmentalists make it harder to build in California, the population is going to go to where they don’t make it so difficult. That means denying or delaying your green project in temperate California will ultimately cause a much browner project in a high-carbon city.

Acting locally, the industry and its allies need to start pushing for changes in CEQA so the impact of having the state’s housing demand met elsewhere is evaluated. After all, what good is saving California if we don’t save the planet? So, if your project is in the LA metropolis (the fourth greenest), it should be compared to a project in Dallas (the fourth brownest), and the net annual global carbon emission difference should be evaluated.

Whether or not that change gets made in Sacramento – and that’s a big whether – you still can use this line of messaging in your local community outreach:

• Include comparative carbon footprint data in your communications and presentations.
• Ask your project’s supporters to question project opponents about why they are so fixated on forcing growth to areas where a net higher global carbon footprint will result.
• Show the comparative data to the decision-makers and opinion-leaders in your community.
• Make sure your EIR contains a discussion of comparative carbon footprints in its greenhouse gas discussion.

If you have questions about any of this, or if you’d like to discuss how best to use this information in projects you’re working on, please call me at 949/599-1212 or email me at laer@laer.com.

Tags: California, co2, environmentalists, Global Warming, green, growth, smog, sprawl

This entry was posted on Thursday, May 7th, 2009 at 12:24 pm and is filed under Development, Environment, Global Warming, Laer's Latest. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.