Climate Change Surprise

Wendell Cox has been surveying the latest information on Greenhouse Gas Emissions and observes that the Australian Conservation Foundation's findings on the emissions from different areas provide some surprising results. People living in the higher density Eastern and Inner Northern Suburbs emit more greenhouse gases than do people living in the lower density single-residential Western suburbs:

WESTERN SYDNEY: CLIMATE CHANGE MODEL

For many years, the urban elites of Australia and Sydney particularly have cast aspersions on western Sydney. Indeed, their distorted views about western Sydney have been a principal foundation of the urban consolidation policies that have destroyed home ownership in Sydney and around the nation. They claim that western Sydney was unplanned, they have divined all manner of phony society costs that were not paid by the residents. To hear the elitist newspaper columnists and cabinet ministers talk, one would imagine that pictures of shantytowns on the banks of a Jakarta river could be substituted for western Sydney photographs without anyone noticing.

This kind of elitism has no place in any nation, and certainly not in a nation with perhaps the world’s strongest egalitarian streak. Indeed, there is much to be proud of in western Sydney. Western Sydney has provided hundreds of thousands of people the opportunity to own their own homes and climb on the ladder of opportunity. If the offense of urban consolidation had been visited upon the city in the 1950s, there would have been no western suburbs. Not only would urban consolidation have priced the next generation out of the housing market, but the generation of their parents and grand-parents.

The imperative now, of course, is to greenhouse gas emission reduction. The crowd that sends off scientists to gather Greenland ice cores at the slightest suggestion of anything that would make middle income lives better is committed to using climate change as the mechanism to engineer people into the life styles that planners prefer. Thus, we must all move out of our detached houses to flats. We must give up our cars for public transport. And on and on and on. And, western Sydney is exactly the kind of place that will have to change, at least according to the creed of the elites.

It must thus have come as something as a surprise for all of this arrogance to be interrupted by reality. The reality is to be found The Australian Conservation Association’s Consumption Atlas, which allocates all of the greenhouse gas emissions based upon their final point of consumption. In fact, the western suburbs do very well indeed. In the western suburbs the annual emission of greenhouses gases is approximately 18.1 tonnes per capita. This is approximately 25 percent less than the favored eastern suburbs at 25.8 tonnes. Among Sydney’s regions, only the southwest does better, at 17.2 tonnes. The southwest includes Campbelltown and Camden, which area really not suburban – they are rather exurban.

The admirable record of the western suburbs does not stop there. The Consumption Atlas shows them to consume less water per capita and to have a smaller ecological footprint. So much for the conventional wisdom.

The reality is that residents of the eastern and near northern suburbs should be standing in line to buy carbon credits from the environmentally more favorable western suburbs (or at least the urban elites should). Rather than being a model to be avoided, as the planners have so wrongly concluded, the western suburbs have proven themselves to be a model for the future.

Data at: http://www.demographia.com/db-sydareaGHG.pdf

Sustainability

We need to firmly reject the deceitful propaganda of the overdevelopment brigade. For example they keep on claiming, or insinuating that high-density is "more sustainable".

But my research shows single residential is more sustainable.

A recent study shows the energy use per person in high-rise is double that of those living in single-residential dwellings. Think of power-hungry lifts, clothes driers, common lighted areas and air contitioning.

Further, my calculations show that the energy embodied in the construction of high-rise is four times that of single residential dwellings (assuming in both cases the buildings last for 70 years).

These two factors far outweigh any energy saved in transport in high-density areas.

The net result is that carbon dioxide emitted resulting from living in high-rise amounts to 9.2 tonnes per person per year, compared to only 6.2 tonnes per year in single residential - about 50% more!

ZEALOT LIES

IT IS INCREDIBLE THE LIES THE ZEALOTS GET AWAY WITH!

They have been telling us for years that high-density is "more sustainable". But...


The following letter was published in the National Post newspaper in the USA, Thursday, February 15, 2007

Two bad ideas from British Columbia
National Post
Published: Thursday, February 15, 2007
Re: It's Time To Talk About Urban Density, Sam Sullivan, Feb. 13.

Vancouver Mayor Sam Sullivan's wish for higher density carries a heavy price. That is already evident in Vancouver area house prices, which are among the highest in the world, relative to incomes, principally because of the region's densification-favouring policies. It is not a foregone conclusion that higher densities are more environmentally friendly. In Sydney, Australia, for example, it has been found that greenhouse gas emissions per capita are lower from detached houses than from high-rise residential buildings. The U.S. Oakridge National Laboratory found that doubling the density of urban areas would do little to reduce greenhouse gas emissions and that vehicle technology improvements were a far better course.

And if all Canadians were to abandon their cars and sport utility vehicles, the nation would still fall short of achieving its Kyoto Accord targets. Sometimes it helps to take a good hard look at the data, without preconceptions.

Wendell Cox

Notes: The energy study referred to is: "Multi-Unit Residential Building Energy and Peak Demand Study" by Paul Myors, Energy Australia with Racheal O'Leary and Rob Helstroom, NSW Department of Planning, October 2005.

This study shows that greenhouse gas emissions in high-rise per person averages 5.4 tonnes of CO2 per year, nearly double the 2.9 tonnes per person per year in detached housing. Other studies show that average per capita water usage is no higher in single-residential than water consumption in high-rise.