Greening the Sunbelt, plus Transit and Inequality
Wired‘s cover package on environmental heresies is a mixed bag. On the minus side, it’s not remotely surprising that dense living is greener, and it hardly counts as environmental heresy. What was unexpected, though it should have been obvious, is the news that air-conditioning is a heck of a lot better than heating when it comes to carbon impact.
When it’s 0 degrees outside, you’ve got to raise the indoor thermometer to 70 degrees. In 110-degree weather, you need to change the temperature by only 40 degrees to achieve the same comfort level. Since air-conditioning is inherently more efficient than heating (that is, it takes less energy to cool a given space by 1 degree than to heat it by the same amount), the difference has big implications for greenhouse gases.
In the Northeast, a typical house heated by fuel oil emits 13,000 pounds of CO2 annually. Cooling a similar dwelling in Phoenix produces only 900 pounds of CO2 a year. Air-conditioning wins on a national scale as well. Salving the summer swelter in the US produces 110 million metric tons of CO2 annually. Heating the country releases nearly eight times more carbon over the same period.
In other news, I believe Matt Power, who wrote both quick-takes, is a friend and landlord of a couple of friends of mine. A small world! Power also argues against buying a shiny new hybrid in favor of buying a used conventional car with good gas mileage.
Briefly, I was thinking about the air conditioning insight as it relates to the relative environmental impact of living in the Frostbelt versus the Sunbelt. And there are a lot of questions, including water sustainability, that you’d need to take into account. Los Angeles is very dense, yet it is extremely auto-dependent. If the city were as transit-friendly as New York, I would move there in a heartbeat. (This is a good reason for Angelenos to maintain the status quo.) That’s a tall order, but we can certainly close the gap in various. Assuming we also rationalized the way we distribute water resources, by pricing water intelligently and eliminating or sharply curtailing irrigation subsidies to agribusiness, the case for the Southland and the Valley of the Sun would become even stronger.
I’d also love to see adoption of something like the Kheel Plan in cities across the United States. Implement high congestion charges and use the revenue to fund free access to high-quality public transportation. That is step one. I would want to encourage private entrepreneurship, by, for example, inviting small-scale entrepreneurs to create jitney services in underserved neighborhoods, rather than banning and harassing such efforts. Also, we could use negative-price bidding to allow private firms to run certain bus rapid transit lines, etc.
There’s a small irony here. This public and private mix of transportation services will further enhance the role of cities as magnets for the ambitious, and in particular the ambitious poor. That is, good public policy will have the effect of exacerbating inequality in cities while improving the lives of the ambitious poor, by giving them better access to jobs and schools, etc. So a narrow focus on inequality doesn’t always serve us well.
Directly tied to water sustainability is the issue of food production. I’d imagine that the “environmental savings” of not heating your house is offset by having to ship in much of your food.
— bjanaszek · May 24, 04:44 PM · #
I am not convinced of this argument. For one thing, even here in chilly New England, your house does not generally drop to 0 degrees on a daily basis, even if you turn the heat off. We heat our house with a pellet stove in our basement, which we run on the lowest setting. Our upper level has a woodstove in the great room, and electric heaters in the bedrooms. We don’t keep the stove burning overnight except on the very coldest nights, and the lowest the temperature has ever dropped inside our house was 55 degrees. When we run the stove, we usually heat the room to the mid-sixties (New Englanders are quite cold hardy, thank you very much). We’ve actually never used the electric heaters, preferring to sleep in a chilly room with nice warm comforters.
My point is that even somewhat insane people like ourselves do not routinely need to raise the temperature from 0 to 70 degrees. Like I said, we are raising it from 55 degrees to about 68 degrees, which is only a 13 degree difference.
We used to live in South Carolina and we did keep the central air going 24/7 from May til October. We were cheapskates, so we set our thermostat to 80 (78 at night), but I knew a lot of people who cooled their houses to 72 degrees (from 100 degrees outside).
Maybe in theory a/c uses less energy, but I bet in practice it is worse.
— Salamander · May 25, 01:08 AM · #
Yeah, Salamander sort of beat me to it but the writer is full of crap. For one thing it’s not clear that the numbers he cites are convincing me that AC is so much more energy efficient than heating (in fact they don’t: the BTUage there isn’t what it consumes it what it puts out/absorbs), for another, he picked a crappy heating system (every New England renter knows, avoid those electric furnaces, man), for yet another, what Salamander said about maintaining temp as opposed to jump-starting it.
Moreover with A/C you have options. Nowadays I don’t pay, even indirectly, for my utilities (which I confess makes me a bad man: I have ditched a lot of fluorescent light bulbs, because I do pay for bulbs). But it just still feels wrong to turn on my A/C — there’s ceiling fans in every room of my house and lots of windows and it hasn’t gotten above 80 F yet — and my abstention amazes my neighbors. In a lot of the country A/C is used when you can manage without it (of course the same is true to a lesser extent of heat, and we native New Englanders are known to totally lose our minds at sunbelters who insist on turning up the damn heat instead of putting on a goddamn sweater).
— Sanjay · May 26, 05:11 PM · #
Reihan’s proposal is a very good one, though I share Salamander’s misgivings about the math in the article. But even assuming he’s wrong, I still very strongly suspect that the Great Lakes region, whence I hail, is vastly more environmentally sustainable than SoCal. To the first commenter, though, I’d suggest that there’s a heck of a lot more food being grown closer to L.A. than to any number of northeastern cities I can think of.
— ERM · May 26, 05:18 PM · #