Urban densification is bad for the planet

We're told, aren't we, that building more densely in our cities will be great for the environment. Cramming everybody into a smaller space means more bikes, more walking, more public transport and fewer of those terrible, evil cars. With the result that, hey presto, all our carbon footprints are ever so much smaller.

Hang on a minute though...



Hmmm. This graph comes from a study by the Australian Conservation Foundation and, echoing similar studies from Chicago and elsewhere, it shows that transport - all those cars - isn't the bad boy you think it is when it comes to our carbon footprint. High-rise, apartment living itself generates a per capita carbon footprint 50% higher than is the case for suburban living. Even with a higher impact from using the car, suburbs are less environmentally damaging than dense urban environments. And this is without us even trying to reduce its footprint.

All this reminds us that, far from eating beef and driving cars being the biggest culprits in terms of energy use, heating or cooling our homes is the baddie. And not only is our individual footprint bigger (largely as a result of unshared accommodation and the lack of families in dense urban environments) there's also that huge additional cost dubbed "operational" - everything from street lighting and traffic management through to lifts and managing communal areas in apartment blocks. The idea that cramming us all together is good for the planet doesn't stack up.

Despite this (and despite denisification being bad for health, congestion and housing affordability) we are still wedded to the idea of ever more dense cities and to the denigration of suburbs as ugly, planet-killing, car-choked hell holes. Time to change.

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The purpose of environmental regulation is the suppression of economic growth

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It would appear that our MPs (or at least the ones on the House of Commons Environmental Audit Committee) haven't been listening to the deep green rhetoric. As a result they don't seem to appreciate that the whole point of environmental regulation is to reduce economic growth. For, as we know those deep green folk like the WWF believe that you can't separate resource consumption and growth. Ergo growth is bad.

"As development increases beyond a certain level, so does per person Footprint — eventually to the point where small gains in development come at the cost of very large Footprint increases."

You've got that? It comes from WWF's Living Planet Report, a report encapsualted as follows:

...green campaigning group WWF...has stated that economic growth should be abandoned, that citizens of the world's wealthy nations should prepare for poverty and that all the human race's energy should be produced as renewable electricity within 38 years from now.

So the whole point and purpose of those green regulations is to slow - better still, eliminate - economic growth. Right now that's not good politics, so our MPs pretend otherwise. As does the chap from WWF UK:

 "Far from putting British companies out of business, environmental policies may well be the saving of them. Leading businesses are crying out for measures such as mandatory carbon reporting and policy certainty for development of the renewable energy sector," said WWF-UK economic policy officer Luke Wreford."

Now you are confused aren't you! Regulations designed to prevent over-use of resources, to reduce "carbon footprints" and, bluntly, to stop growth are described as the salvation of business. And to justify this we've dreamt up that most oxymoronic of ideas: green growth:

The committee calls for a long-term view based on a proper strategy for green growth, including more investment in renewable sources of energy to reduce UK reliance on imported fossil fuels. 

For investment read "government spending"! Either economic growth is a bad thing (as the Living Planet Report sets out pretty clearly) and regulations or protections are needed to stop it or else it isn't, in which case we need fewer of those controls. In the end environmental regulation will always be anti-growth.

Sadly, our MPs seem not to have worked this out yet.

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