Increasing mileage standards will do little to measurably reduce greenhouse gas emissions. In order to seriously tackle climate change we need to ditch the cars, and the development patterns they encourage, and move to walkable places.
In an exceprt from his new book, Walkable City: How Downtown Can Save America, One Step at a Time, Jeff Speck addresses the connection between density, walkability, and greenhouse gas emissions.
"It turns out that trading all of your incandescent lightbulbs for energy
savers conserves as much carbon per year as living in a walkable
neighborhood does each week," observes Speck. "Why, then, is the vast majority of our
national conversation on sustainability about the former and not the
latter?"
"Places should be judged not by how much carbon they emit, but by how
much carbon they cause us to emit. There are only so many people in the
United States at any given time, and they can be encouraged to live
where they have the smallest environmental footprint. That place turns
out to be the city - the denser the better."
"Quality of life - which includes both health and wealth - may not be a
function of our ecological footprint, but the two are deeply
interrelated. To wit, if we pollute so much because we are throwing away
our time, money, and lives on the highway, then both problems would
seem to share a single solution, and that solution is to make our cities
more walkable. Doing so is not easy, but it can be done, it has been
done, and indeed it is being done in more than a few places at this very
moment."
FULL STORY: Stop climate change: Move to the city, start walking
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