blog.wired.com/wiredscience/2008/04/new-high-res-ma.html
The work provides unprecedented resolution into US greenhouse gas emissions. After all, a single large city like Houston can sprawl over 1,500 square kilometers.
Vulacnhighres There's a lot of information you could mine from these maps, but one thing stood out to me: the West, for all of our hippie do-gooders, isn't doing well (as a whole) from a per-capita emissions perspective. We simply don't live in dense enough situations to benefit from the efficiency gains created by urban living. Lots of infrastructure serving only a few people generates high per-capita emissions. UPDATE (12:50 pm): Just a little more food for thought after reading the comments. It's not California cities that are necessarily doing the damage.
Advertisement What time of the year does this represent? I would have thought that the CO2 emissions would be higher in the North, since we need to run furnaces for half the year to keep from freezing to death.
Apr 16, 2008 4:50:20 AM ndocumented immigrants factored in as part of teh per-capita footprint of CA would falsely skew the data as the primay data used in the Vulcon project do not account for the individual production of CO2 from the varies sources used by such persons: campfires, cars not properly registered and maintained to state smog standards, use of charcoal grills for BBQs, burning of trash, etc.
Apr 16, 2008 6:01:11 AM @Ron: This is an annual number for 2002. The Northeast is dense with access to public transportation, etc. But if you're dividing by a population and only some of that population is captured by census data, it's going to skew things slightly. I'm guessing that we agree that US immigration policy is messed up, but that doesn't mean that undocumented workers don't exist.
Apr 16, 2008 7:18:03 AM Alexis I agree with that sentiment. But the immigrants don't explain why people in LA refuse to use the subway and carpool, like the east coast does. It also doesn't explain why areas like mine, which have no public transportation, the average commute per resident is 30 miles, and the average family has one car per resident of driving age has a lower per capita footprint than an area where they make it possible for people to get around without each person driving a car by themselves. You certainly don't think that a group of people that are largely in extreme poverty, complete with cramming more people than is safe into small cars are affecting the carbon footprint more than soccer moms with all the latest gadgetry going 24/7 and an enormous SUV, do you? Let's be honest - it's not about immigrants, it's about the attitude on the west coast. What's yours is yours, you want to drive your cars, drink your bottled water, and look down the nose at people who you deem "polluters" but fail to notice your own inequities and instead try to pass some of the buck along to the population that is most likely contributing the least of all of us, owing to their inability to do so. Everyone needs an attitude adjustment on these issues, but I fail to see how an area with a built in infrastructure which you claim to be sparcely populated (come to my neck of the woods, honey - you don't know sparce, I'm talking miles between houses, with trucks, cars, ATVs, etc running because they HAVE TO, not because they're too lazy to walk) and perports themselves to be as green as one can be has any excuse whatsoever to be producing more carbon than others. The remark was pompous, no matter how you try to justify it by claiming it "skews the data." Haven't you noticed that there are illegal immigrants everywhere?
Apr 16, 2008 7:56:14 AM Alexis - the North and the Northeast are not necessarily the same thing. Why is it that the Southwest, with it's lack of major furnace needs is worse off than the North, where winter lasts half of the year? My thought on it - don't forget that the air conditioner puts out carbon as well. Although you may be running that furnace for half the year, those in Arizona, for example, are running the air conditioner for 9 months or better. When I lived in Florida, we never turned the heater on (I am assuming that we had one and that it worked, but I honestly can't swear to it), and never turned the air conditioner off. The area is also orange (the 7th color down) on the map. Where I live now it is pretty much a 6month-6month split, heating and air. And the area I live in now is light green (the 2nd color down) on the map. Obviously, there is more to it, therefore, than heating and cooling. Frankly, I turn off my lights when I'm not in a room and keep the heater on as low as possible (we bundle up in the winter time instead) to save money, not to save carbon. I drive a car that gets great gas mileage to keep the bills down. If money weren't an issue, one would have to consciously do these things for the purpose of helping the environmental cause. It's most likely several factors, but the fact is that the majority of people in the country are doing far better than I thought they were. The only places that look like they have some serious work to do are those in the west and southwest. Surprising considering the "evironmentally-holier-than-thou" attitude of so many west-coasters I have spoken to.
Apr 16, 2008 9:24:19 AM @Anonymous commenter: I think it's best to look at both maps together. As a combo, I think they are immensely useful and will only get more so as more years worth of data are added.
Apr 16, 2008 9:30:07 AM @Ron - Actually Air Conditioners (aka central cooling units) use far more power than heaters do. Which is why you see blackouts, brown outs and power shortages mainly in the summer. I'm not sure but I think it has something to do with everything in your home, including you, creating heat.
Apr 16, 2008 9:45:29 AM @Ron Whilst it is partly that, its also to do witht he fact that it takes far more energy to run the inefficient methods of removing heat that it does to create heat. Inefficient electrical systems create heat, and so central heating systems are arguably 100% efficient - all the energy they transfer goes into the state it is wanted - Heat. The fact with removal of heat, however, is that any attempt to remove heat ultimately lands it somewhere else. Its the second law of thermodynamics (entropy) that entropy (or chaos in a system) always increases, regardless. When we affect a system by removing heat we place it somewhere else, using a rather ineffienct way - hence why air-conditioning is bad. Ha - I just read what I wrote again for spelling errors.
Apr 16, 2008 10:13:10 AM @Ron, @George: You also have to remember that insulation practices in the north are going to be many times better than in the south. While insulation may seem like it is only useful when dealing with keeping heat in, it certainly does help minimize the amount of time that the furnace needs to burn in order to keep the house a nice temperature. Perhaps a little weatherstripping may help those in the south that run their air conditioners for that long keep their power bills down?
Apr 16, 2008 10:16:14 AM It looks like if we could just convince Mexico to take back Texas and California we wouldn't need to make any cuts to our carbon emissions.
Apr 16, 2008 10:29:00 AM I think almost everyone is missing the larger point, which is that this data can easily enable policymakers to craft energy policies for different segments of the United States. After all, it makes no sense to impose the same energy policy on Rhode Island as Arizona. This also provides deeper insight into where energy is used. The next step is figuring out how the energy is being used, and whether or not we can gain more efficiencies. In some cases, like the big red spot around Midland, Texas due to the petroleum industry, it may be that no or very few new efficiencies can be realized. But for large urban centers like southern California, there may be a lot that can be done. Regarding the Adirondacks, my bet is that it's the timber industry located there. It doesn't produce much pollution, but given the scarce population there, it probably is very high on a per capita basis.
I had myself convinced that we would be CO2 pigs living here in the Great White N...
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