On Jan 24, 2010, at 3:00 PM, Michael Smith wrote:
> On Sun, 24 Jan 2010 19:05:42 -0000
> "James Heartfield" <Heartfield at blueyonder.co.uk> wrote:
>
>> But the evidence is that suburban contribution to greenhouse gas
>> emissions is less than urban.
>>
>> www.propertyoz.com.au/library/RDC_ACF_Greenhouse-Report.pdf
>
> Sad, flimsy, tendentious stuff. The technique here is to compare the
> GHG
> implications of *all* consumption -- they even apparently include
> State
> consumption, e.g. military expenditures, and prorate that somehow
> over the population in the inner, urban areas and the outer, low-
> density
> areas. (How this magic is done does not clearly appear since the study
> depends on another source, the Australian Conservation Foundation
> Consumption Atlas.)
It looks like the result is driven by income - the richer you are, the higher your GHG emissions, and since the capital cities are richer than the periphery, QED. The honest way to go about this would be to control for income and other demographic characteristics (e.g., household size) and see if density were still significant and positively related to emissions.
I see from table 3 that the higher the level of auto ownership, the higher the GHG footprint. Sorta contradicts the rest of the message, doesn't it?
Doug