The Unintended Consequences of Environmentalistm

I'm reading a book called, "Triumph of the City" by Harvard Professor Edward Glaeser, wherein he talks about why high-density, urban living is the most environmentally beneficial way of living.  In one of the chapters, he writes about why so many antigrowth policies are bad for the environment. He also offers plenty of statistics regarding the relationship between carbon emission and population density, such as how "gas consumption per family per year declines by 106 gallons as the number of residents per square mile doubles," and how residents in California urban areas use so much less energy than residents of urban areas in the American south.

Given that so many locals justify blocking local development by invoking global warming, I thought it would be interesting to share the following summary from that chapter of the book:

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So how should we interpret all this data? Simply put, if we wanted to reduce emissions by changing our land-development policies, more Americans should live in denser, more urban environments. More Americans should move to coastal California and fewer should live in Texas. California is blessed with a splendid natural climate that doesn't require much cooling in the summer or heat in the winter. Living in Houston or Atlanta requires a lot more energy for habitability, so then why aren't more Americans living in California?

The answer certainly isn't overcrowding. California's coastal areas are remarkably open. The drive along Route 280 through the heart of Silicon Valley is like a drive through an open Eden. There are about 2 people living on each acre in Santa Clara County. Marin County, just north of the bay, has more than one-and-a-quarter acres per person. By contrast, Montgomery County in Maryland has about 3 people per acre. Manhattan has 111 people per acre, and that isn't counting the vast crowd of workers that comes and goes each day.

Coastal California could house many millions more than it already does, but the growth in these coastal regions has fallen dramatically from its postwar heyday. Between 1950 and 1970, the population of Santa Clara County more than tripled, from fewer than three hundred thousand to more than one million. But between 1990 and 2008, Santa Clara County grew by only 17.8 percent, less than the national average, from 1.5 million to 1.76 million. Over the last seventeen years, Silicon Valley has been one of the most productive places on the planet, but its population growth has lagged behind the rest of the nation's.

Coastal California hasn't grown because it hasn't built much housing. An area that doesn't build much won't grow much. Coastal California's construction declines don't reflect a lack of demand. In 2007, the National Association of Realtors median sales price passed $800,000 in both San Francisco and San Jose. Even after the crash, these places remain the two most expensive areas in the continental United States, with average housing prices around $600,000 in the second quarter of 2010. Prices in California are kept high by draconian limits on new construction, like the sixty-acre minimum lot sizes that can be found in Marin County. These rules are joined with a policy of pulling more and more land off the market as protected parks and wildlife areas. By 2000, one quarter of the land in the Bay Area has become permanently protected, that is, off limits to building.

Many environmentalists see the reduction of development in the San Francisco Bay region as a great triumph. The pioneers of the Save the Bay movement, which formed to block development around the water, have become iconic figures in American environmentalism. The Friends of Mammoth case, which imposed environmental reviews on all new California projects, is seen as a watershed victory. The advocates of California's growth limitations are often put forward as ecological heroes. But they're not.

The enemies of development in California are quick to point out that restricting construction is necessary because of the state's sparse water supplies. Yet California would have more than enough water for its citizens if it didn't use so much of it irrigating naturally dry farmland. California's cities and suburbs use about 8.7 million acre-feet of water each year for irrigation. America is filled with wet regions that can raise crops. By redirecting water from farm areas to cities, California could easily provide enough water to sustain much higher density levels, which would reduce America's carbon footprint.

While limits on California's growth may make that state seem greener, they're making the country as a whole browner and increasing carbon emissions worldwide. Houston's developers should thank California's antigrowth movement. If they hadn't stopped building in coastal California, where incomes are high and the climate is sublime, then there wouldn't have been nearly as much demand for living in the less pleasant parts of the Sunbelt.

People who fight development don't get to choose the amount of new construction throughout the country; they only get to make sure it doesn't occur in their backyard. At the national level, a principle that could be called the law of conservation of construction appears to hold. When environmentalists stop development in the green places, it will occur in brown places. By using ecological arguments to oppose growth, California environmentalists are actually ensuring that America's carbon footprint will rise, by pushing new housing to less temperate climates.

The 1970 California Environmental Quality Act was a pioneering piece of legislation, which mandated that any local government project have an environmental impact review before it went forward. In 1973, an environmentally activist California Supreme Court interpreted this act to mean not only projects undertaken by local governments, but also projects permitted by local government, which means pretty much any large construction project in the state. In 2008, California's regulations generated 583 environmental impact reviews, considerably more than the 522 impact reviews that occurred nationwide in response to federal guidelines. These impact reviews add costs and delays to new construction, which ultimately make it even more expensive.

The great flaw of environmental impact reviews is their incompleteness. Each review only evaluates the impact of the project if it's approved, not the impact if it's denied and construction begins somewhere else, outside the jurisdiction of the California Supreme Court. The incompleteness of the reviews stacks the environmental deck against California construction and makes it seem as though it's always greener to stop new building. The full impact would note that permitting building in California would reduce construction somewhere else, such as the once pristine desert outside of Las Vegas. Assessing the full environmental cost of preventing construction in California would make that state's environmental policies look more brown than green.

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Posted by Steve Sinai