"dont do x and you're not green, period"

except x in this case is everyone's pet issue that they bug everyone about because they are vain and narcissistic.

Don’t dig density? You’re not green. Period.

Ah yes, the "neener neener" approach to political discourse. Way to change hearts and minds, Savage.

Does the Toronto area have large employment centers in its suburbs? Do lots of Torontoites (Torontians?) reverse commute? Is there a Toronto version of the Eastside?

If a person lives in a dense neighborhood but commutes by SOV someplace outside the city/neighborhood, that density doesn't really mean shit as far as their GHG footprint goes.

Wait... I've seen that somewhere before... oh! I know. "If you're not with us, you're against us."

An argument which, if I recall, Dan found extremely compelling.

So basically, still the same kind of asshole, just working for a different cause.

Well, I guess it's time to sell your house and move into a shoebox above Pioneer Square, huh?

Dan,

What Greg said...

Judah is on the rag. BTW, where is Mr Poe at?

I had to go to Wikipedia to find out that GHG was short for "greenhouse gas" (the Sightline piece doesn't define it either). LOL WTF TLA

This, from a guy who seems to hop on an airplane a couple times a month! Ever calculate your carbon footprint, Dan?

See! This is what I keep saying.

Now, if you happen to already live in a suburb, consider doing one or more of the following:

a. using native plants that require less water and less non-organic fertilizer (hint: compost).

b. move closer to work or transit you can use (if any).

c. replace that 15 mpg SUV with an 80 mpg bio-diesel plug-in hybrid SUV (or at least one of the five hybrid SUVs that get 26 mpg or more).

d. have your older relatives live with you if it makes sense (this offsets the loss from living in the suburbs partially).

e. buy 100 percent green energy.

Since urban dwellers use so much less, the largest changes are those done by the inefficient suburban dwellers. Period.

There is a lot of truth to this. The biggest part of my carbon footprint is driving. I have to do some driving for my work, but if I lived closer to down town, I could certainly eliminate probably half my driving easily. I couldn't completely get rid of my car, but I'd certainly be able to use it a lot less.

Also, I live in an older house that is not particularly well insulated. We've added double pane windows, and blown extra insulation in the attic, but it still leaks heat far worse than modern construction. And in condos or apartments, there is a lot less heat loss. Mostly, you've got one or two exterior walls. Other walls are shared, as is the ceiling and floor (except for the top and bottom floors). Even an older condo or apartment building is more efficient to heat than most single family homes.

I can improve my carbon footprint by buying a higher mileage car (my current car gets about 25mpg on the highway). But if I lived in a condo downtown, I could drive a Hummer and still have a lower carbon footprint than I do now.

Dan,

Go fuck yourself. Really.

@11: Good points. But you probably wouldn't be able to park your Hummer.

I live in a three-story apartment building in Kent. That's about the most density I can afford the rent on.

twee @9:

This, from a guy who seems to hop on an airplane a couple times a month! Ever calculate your carbon footprint, Dan?

I totally agree with Dan's post. And yet, as someone who agonizes over his own carbon footprint, every time I read Dan pontificating about climate change, I can't help but think that he does not even come close to practicing what he preaches.

Dan, for the record, please calculate your carbon footprint and let us know the result. You can even leave out the business travel and just count the leisure travel.

I say this not to pick on Dan, but rather to point out what a wrenching issue climate change is. It's an issue that requires from all of us a really high level of, for want of a better term, "intellectual humility." Dan just makes an easy target. The sad truth is that one affluent urbanite who hardly drives but flies a lot has a much, much greater carbon footprint than a working class exurbanite who drives everywhere but rarely flies.

Dan doesn't exactly do nuance, does he?

As they say, for every difficult and complicated question, there is an answer that is simple, easily understood, and wrong.

Whether or not you live in a dense neighborhood, the question that Dan (I think) is raising is, "do you take political action to oppose density?"

If you're going to live in North Bend, whatever; that's a lot better than living in Wallingford and organizing to fight density where it's wanted and needed.

but those planes he's flying on will still fly, with or without him. doesn't seem fair to hold that against dan, unless he's flying in a private jet, in which case he's a fucking asshole.

You don't understand economics, do you, Brandon?

cressona @15
does he also live in some big ol' single family house near volunteer park? i mean, is that his idea of a dense neighborhood? it looks like some ritzy suburb around there, hardly a compact neighborhood.

Wow, Dan, we agree!

Livestock causes more global warming emissions than all transportation combined.

Dig hamburgers? You’re not green. Period.

@17,

Right, because no one who moved to Wallingford (which, last I checked, was in the City of Seattle) because they liked it has ANY right to oppose the gods of commerce and density (oh, and as an aside - Wallingford is actually pretty densely packed as single-family neighborhoods go).

Really dumb argument, that - and profoundly undemocratic, too.

If you think climate change is a threat, embrace dense development. If you can’t do the latter you need to shut the fuck up about the former.

I think I'll not embrace the latter without shutting the fuck up about the former.

If you're really concerned about climate change, it is simply narcissistic feel-good-ism to think that any transit package cooked up here, and any alleged "density" that will come from it, it going to have a significant effect on climate change overall.

We already have "sprawl", people are going to be driving around in it, and the number of car-miles driven in this region is going to go up and up and up. We're not building a region from scratch, where auto transit really could be fully sabotaged through land use and transit placement.

People really concerned with the climate change thing should put their muscle where it really could help, in drastically reducing the emissions from each automobile. Why not? New cars today emit only a few percent of the emissions of new cars 30 years ago. Fight for continuing improvement in this area.

But, unfortunately, I think most people carping about "carbon footprint" on here are more concerned with punishing suburbanites for their suburban lifestyle and getting themselves the transit system of their dreams than actually doing something about climate change.

And, for the record, I like the "dense" lifestyle but I don't believe in futile, vindictive attempts to force it upon others.

22 proves my point that this is a pet interest issue.

as for whether Dan flying is something you can hold against him;

1. Does Dan choosing to fly affect whether the specific plane trip he is planning will actually occur?

2. Are flights scheduled with the expectation that they will be filled ahead of actual demand for them?

3. Are flights scheduled because Dan has shown that he is willing and likely to fly in the future?

4. If Dan decided not to fly would that flight have been scheduled in the future?

from answering these questions and more I think it becomes obvious that Dan isn't personally responsible or directly responsible for the carbon output of the airplane he flew on that day, but he is responsible for future flights being available by providing a base expectation of travel for the airlines to schedule around.

is this a bigger impact then someone personally deciding to drive to work on a daily basis? I don't think youd be able to sufficiently quantify Dan deciding to fly and the aggregate effect on future planes flying and compare that to the easily quantified carbon output of daily driving.

because you can't easily place personal blame on one person deciding to fly and you can do so with driving, eating meat, etc etc. it makes more sense to go after the easier things first.

@22 i know your being sarcastic, but that's kinda true. but you can't expect everyone to be perfect.
i think mhd@17 is making the only valid point here. it's all about what you support or more importantly what you actively oppose. if you don't want to live in dense urban communities that's fine, but don't act against measures that facilitate others from doing so, such as development projects and public transit. if you do shoot down such things than i would agree that you are not green. period.

@11, @13 - but if you lived in the city, you probably wouldn't drive your Hummer as often, since you could walk, and it takes so long to find parking ...

which would be even BETTER.

"Don’t dig density? You’re not green. Period.

It's not the density itself that is the problem, but the kind of bland, cookie-cutter, faux-hip, local business destroying kind of density that i detest. The suburban mindset imposing itself upon the city. We could do without that aspect, I'd say.

In a sprawl v. destiny deathmatch, of course density wins; but does it have to be the sort that steps on the little guy, makes neighborhoods "lily white", and full of prius owning snobs who look down on those who don't meet their green criteria and, *GASP* ride a bike or walk to where they're goin'?

I would like to say that you too can be green. Like enviro (not the politico).

If you're on Facebook, just join We Are Green Seattle. Then download the I Am Green facebook app.

David Suzuki's on there, and you can get practical ideas on what you can do, and have objective actions that answer the age old question: "Am I Green?"

P.S.: you can friend me too, just tell me you're from SLOG, cause I don't auto approve stuff ...

As an outsider who follows Slog because it's 100 times better than the Village Voice (so please discount whatever I say accordingly), I will say this was an awesome post. Cars and highways and suburban sprawl of any sort should be taxed to death, and any "green" person who disagrees is a hypocrite. I invite everyone to check out Washington Heights, Manhattan aka the densest neighborhood in the entire country, known primarily for drug dealers and macho Latin guys who (are unconsciously green and) secretly heading over to the "Blowzebo" in our local city park. (No malls either.)

I would agree with Dan, but would go a lot further. Eat meat? Dairy? You're not an environmentalist. http://www.guardian.co.uk/environment/2007/jul/19/climatechange.climatechange
Buy pretty much anything? You're contributing to the problem. Buying that new hybrid to feel good about yourself? Way worse than sticking with your existing gas guzzler. (and why does nobody ever seem to realize those damn hybrids come with several hundred pounds of batteries containing all manner of heavy, toxic metals and chemicals. CO2 emissions aren't the issue) Real progress won't be made until those dense badly designed condos make energy and clean the air and can be entirely disassembled and their constituent parts reused. Until every building or city block has it's own energy producing wind turbine (or whatever else costs little in energy and materials to produce). And until people just stop procreating so damn much.

@3,

Yes, there is plenty of reverse-commuting in Toronto, as done by Torontonians. There is even cross-suburb commuting (e.g living in Whitby in the East, working in Oakville in the West) but those people should be declared clinically insane.

(I'd say we have about 5 different suburban areas that are like Eastside, two of which are within Toronto proper. [It's complicated. Suffice it to say that Toronto is really, really big.])

Not that I have the whole article to read, but presumably the charts are created based on where you live (in a high-density vs. a low-density neighbourhood), and incorporates both people who live in one region and work in that region with people who live in that region but work in a different region. That is, the effect you mention is already blended into these graphs. If you could stratify this data into 4 or more graphs you would see even more pronounced effects.

But even then I think it is of limited meaning to just look at suburban vs. downtown Toronto. I'd like to see similar data for Boston, Seattle, Atlanta, LA, the Bay Area, etc. And throw in Vienna, London, Sydney and Hong Kong while we're at it. Different cities have very different density profiles.

One really good illustration of this is at Richard Florida's blog. http://creativeclass.typepad.com/thecreativityexchange/2007/11/my-mega-at-nigh.html Toronto is the large horizontally-oriented blog along the top of the image, roughly 6.5 million people. Buffalo is the blob towards the bottom, 1.3 million. Comparing areas, it looks to me like the Toronto area is two times as dense at least.

i think people around here would be more open to the idea of density if

A) Developers built better looking large buildings. Remember, good taste costs nothing.

B) There was more greenspace in the most urban areas. We do alright in most neighborhoods, but downtown is pretty sorely lacking.

C) WE HAD SOME FUCKING RAIL!!! Seriously Seattle, how can we take ourselves seriously as being progressive if we still rely on massively overcrowded freeways to make daily trips?

The more I think about it, the results of this study shouldn't come as a surprise. Canadians, as we know, don't really produce carbon emissions. They have magical trains that take people anywhere they want to go. Those unenlightened souls who still drive cars use vehicles that run purely on good thoughts. The healthcare system is free and there's never a line to see a doctor. People own guns, but don't use them, and everyone leaves their doors unlocked. Farts smell like petunias.

It's almost as nice as Chicago.

@31: "Why does nobody ever seem to realize those damn hybrids come with several hundred pounds of batteries containing all manner of heavy, toxic metals and chemicals."

Maybe they do realize it, but they also realize that batteries are recycled and the toxic materials reclaimed?

Funny that Sightline would post this now. They and their director, Alan Durning, have been anti Sound Transit and light rail for years.

Building 50 miles of light rail and over 20 dense station areas might, just might, have done something to change the auto culture in this region.

But instead we get...buses, more buses...

#36, I hate to bring this up again, but people keep repeating this "light rail causes density" argument...

Light rail only promotes density in urban areas, and not when the stations are surrounded by giant parking lots and enormous traffic. All of ST2's suburban light rail stations would have been surrounded by gigantic 500-1000 spot park and ride lots with ridiculous amounts of traffic in the surrounding areas.

Here are examples of the "density" caused by existing park and ride lots. There are many more but I can only post two links (check the WSDOT page):

Lynnwood Park & Ride (984 parking spaces)
Bellevue Park & Ride (678 parking spaces)

Suburban car-centered light rail is anti-density, not pro-density. Light rail will only be useful if it serves urban areas and high traffic suburban destinations (airport, Microsoft, etc), not parking lots in the middle of nowhere.

@37: There was an attempt to put up a rather sizable hotel/condo building near the Sounder rail station in Auburn, of all places. They got as far as building the parking garage, then the project stalled, I suspect due to the real estate downturn. They've now seeded grass on the lot, so it looks like Auburn lost a whole block of its downtown for nothing.

Um, regardless of what self-righteous Capitol Hill types think, Belleuve and Lynnwood aren't in "the middle of nowhere", and a whole lot of Seattle residents work in or near both of those suburban cities.

As someone who *uses* a park-and-ride lot almost daily, I'm also a little tired of mass transit elitists dissing them. Would they really rather have me drive all the way to work, just because I can't get a bus from my doorstep? I thought the idea was to get people to drive less in single-occupancy vehicles. The park-and-ride lets me reduce the single-occupancy part of my commute from 30 miles to 5.

Developers built better looking large buildings. Remember, good taste costs nothing.

I'm no architect, but I still doubt that. If developers weren't churning out cookie-cutter buildings, they'd have to pay actual architects to design something decent/interesting. I also imagine that the building materials that make such developments possible cost more.

Where WOULD we be if we didn't have Mr. Savage preaching the orthodoxy from his Strange pulpit? For somebody who has such a beef with religion, and with bigots, you'd think he'd be less dogmatic and more tolerant...