If you correctly price in the negative externalities of burning gasoline, then the suburbs suddenly get a lot more expensive, and it makes more sense to densify.
It's not working well in France with the Giletes Jaunes. Basically taxing the suburbs told a large social class of working poor people they have no right to exist. I suppose you could try warehousing them in the projects, but good luck with that.
Building the physical infrastructure for all those suburbians to live in the cities would also have a carbon impact.
In practical terms, in five years or so it's not going to be hard to get people to buy electric cars instead of gasoline, but it will still be practically impossible to get them to give up their houses, back yards, and cars to go live in the city.
I am largely opposed to regressive measures like this, but in this case I tend to believe the continued survival of our species and our planet supercede concerns about temporary inequalities imposed by our solutions.
Still we must be vigilant that our solutions don't accidentally (or intentionally!) factor down to "there's too many humans, lets starve out some of those poors".
I completely agree with you about that. There are a number of climate change solutions (particularly around population control measures) that land uncomfortably close to eugenics. As a side note, my wife and I are not having children precisely because of the climate crisis. We don't want to bring children into a world that is looking increasingly unsurvivable.
There are much better solutions that target the actual large polluters. People living in suburbs is a small percentage of total global emissions, especially when you consider transportation of goods. Transporting goods across the oceans is a far larger percentage of emissions than people living in suburbs.
If the goal is to continue to survive as a species, there are much more effective strategies to implement.
Suburban living on average doubles the climate impact of the same number of people in a city. The OP notes correctly that this externality is not correctly priced in the current market.
How do you calculate the value of such an externality? Even if for argument's sake I were to just accept that it's double the climate impact on average, doubling a very small value is not really meaningful. The average American carbon footprint is roughly the same regardless.
You also haven't considered that as you move people into cities you need to scale up infrastructure in the city itself. Living spaces, transportation around the city, supply lines for supermarkets. Everything needs to scale. It's not black and white that moving everyone into a tightly packed city is going to make a meaningful difference to global emissions.
What would make a tremendous difference is turning the entire grid into a green smart grid powered by solar, wind, geothermal, etc. That would change things regardless of where people live, because the sources of energy are decentralized and can exist basically anywhere that natural resources like solar and wind exist.
You sort of can’t directly calculate externalities. That’s what makes them externalities.
The common answer is to not calculate it but to add a carbon tax. If you make gas more expensive, road taxes higher and non-renewable energy higher cost, the market actors will change their behavior.
As for the infrastructure cost, you pay that in either case and it’s more efficiently built the denser things are.
This isn’t a bottleneck style problem where removing the worst thing reorders the thing underneath it. We need to start targeting all of the inefficiencies and carbon emitters. The suburbs are worse for the environment plain & simple so we need to improve on that.
The amount of carbon emitted from people driving to and from suburbs is actually a small amount compared to the real big polluters. It makes no sense to target such a giant restructuring of society for so little gain.
instead of trying to quantify this statement, let's look at trends and actions in governance (since this is not new)
from the Global Climate Action Summit 2018, convened by CA Gov Jerry Brown:
Every 5 weeks, China adds a fleet of electric buses equivalent to
the entire London bus fleet – 9500 buses. Technologies are now
market ready, societally acceptable and economically attractive to
reduce greenhouse gas emissions from transport by 51% by 2030,
through electric vehicles, mass transit and adapting the global
shipping fleet. A complete global and technological shift to electric
vehicles now looks very likely and, given recent announcements from
cities, countries and car manufacturers, is possible between 2020
and 2030. However, the transformation will slow dramatically without
strong national and city policies, for example setting target dates to
ban internal combustion engines.
Have a look at a google search on “cargo ship pollution” and draw your own conclusions.
Simply moving cargo, the lifeblood of our economy, across the oceans burns hundreds of tons of fuel oil - releasing more (and more varied) pollutants into the atmosphere and oceans. One ship, by some reports, emits as many emissions as some 50 million (or more) cars. And there are well over 9,000 on the ocean.
And that is why researchers are proposing we bring back Zeppelins! Zeppelins that are 10x as long as the Empire State Tower is tall, to be exact. Way better for the environment, can be operated autonomously, and cheap to produce.
If I take hanniabu's numbers, that ends up with 8000 ft. zeppelins--the length of airport runways. That's probably not going to be operationally viable: going by the space the largest seaports take up today, you have space to berth only a few of them--maybe 5 at best--at the very largest of them. There's therefore going to be very poor operational flexibility for choosing routes, and with the sheer size and capacity, multi-destination itineraries are going to struggle with long dwell times to partially load/unload them.
You figures are incorrect, this is taken directly from the linked article:
> As proposed in a recent scientific paper, the new airships would be 10 times bigger than the 800-foot Hindenburg — more than five times as long as the Empire State Building is tall
Those numbers are for some very specific substances (which are also bad, nobody's contesting that), but not for CO2-equivalent emissions. It's the same kind of dumb number as that cloth bag reuse count vs plastic. Technically true for some aspect, but utterly misleading.
The Wikipedia article does not say this: « It also includes greenhouse gas emissions. The International Maritime Organization (IMO) estimates that carbon dioxide emissions from shipping were equal to 2.2% of the global human-made emissions in 2012 »
