Jonathan Baker on Ecodensity, Global Warming and Snitty Hall

The following is a shorter version of a major paper prepared by Jonathan Baker, former City Councilor, lawyer and good friend.

Cool Zoning

Groucho Marx observed that politics is the art of looking for trouble, finding it everywhere, analyzing it incorrectly and applying the wrong solutions. That about sums up Vancouver’s proposed Eco density Charter.

Desperate to appear to be doing something about global warming, City Hall threatens to rezone huge chunks of the single-family neighborhoods of Vancouver and purports to apply ecological footprint theory to zoning. The argument is that high-density apartment living helps cool the earth, because it supposedly produces fewer greenhouse gases. Urban Planner William Rees is the father of Ecological Footprintism. In an article, “Is Humanity Fatally Successful” Rees argues that mankind should be perfectly happy with an income of about $7500 per year. It is comforting to know that we can achieve sustainability if we merely adopt the standard of living of a failed state.

Serious concerns about catastrophic climate change are not new nor are the occasional idiotic proposals to deal with it. In 1950 Emanuel Velikovsky, a charismatic psychoanalyst and amateur astronomer suggested that the earth might wobble and tip at any moment because of the accumulation of polar ice. Some politicians urgently proposed at the time that the US detonate as many nuclear bombs as necessary at one or another of the poles to lighten things up at the heavy end of the planet and thus save the environment.

Mark Twain joked a hundred and twenty-five years ago, “Everyone is talking about the weather but no one does anything about it.” Today City Council is about to take him up on it and rezone for a cooler climate.

Assuming that carbon dioxide and not gamma rays is the driving force of climate change, current climate models offer little benefit to decision makers. For all of the computational power available today, the climate system is too complicated to make a reliable computational model. It is made up of numerous interlocking subsystems, which interact with each other. In some cases there is uncertainty about whether changes would bring a positive or negative feedback. Today's models require that numerous assumptions be made but the wrong assumption can lead to an incorrect model result. There is no indication that the City has made any effort at all to model the impacts of its proposals.

This is a problem. Governments were certain that replacing fossil fuels with biofuels was a sure way of reducing CO2 emissions. That is not how it turned out. A study reported on January 9, 2008 supports earlier research that some biofuels result in more CO2 than fossil fuels.[1]

In this context of uncertainty where scientists argue about whether the world will end in fire or ice, City Hall thinks that by redeveloping single-family areas they will be doing their bit to save the world. They assume that high-density buildings are more sustainable with respect to CO2 emissions. It is quite an assumption. Old buildings have to be demolished and carted off to the land-fill. New construction itself demands a lot of energy. Apartments and their common areas with elevators, lights, heat, air conditioning and other facilities demand enormous amounts of energy and generate lots of carbon dioxide. [2]

An alternative to high-rise construction that has received a fair amount of political blabber is to allow and encourage small houses in yards. The infill, however, will happen at the expense of trees and vegetation which of course photosynthesize CO2 to produce oxygen. How good is that?

And have you heard the one about how the residents of the new improved dense areas are sure to commute to work by transit and shop in the neighborhood? The trouble is that Vancouver’s commuting and shopping patterns have already changed. Increasing numbers of people choose to live in the City, commute to work outside of it and shop at mega-stores. Increasing the density is just as likely therefore to increase car use.[3]

Dense urban areas are magnets. The boulevards of Paris, which has the best public transportation system in the World, are jammed with cars.

Increasing Vancouver’s density by redeveloping and paving over single-family neighborhoods will solve the politicians’ problem of raising money from developers. To propose it as an environmental solution is scandalous.

Sincerely,

JONATHAN BAKER ,

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[1] http://www.sciencedaily.com/releases/2008/01/080103144404.htm

[2] Eco D. Charter “Higher density buildings consume less energy and water, especially when combined with green design.”

[3] Eco D. Charter “Two key contributors to climate change are transportation and building energy use. EcoDensity can help reduce both. Well-located density puts people close to shops, jobs, amenities and services, meaning more trips are made by walking, biking and transit, instead of by car. This also creates a larger customer base for local shopping areas, supporting a wider array of shops and services, which in turn, means that even more needs can be fulfilled close to home. Similarly, putting people close to transit means more trips are made using transit, and makes better transit service more feasible