Carbon emissions

And the winner is...

A much-criticised city turns out to be one of America's greenest

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Readers' comments


Ronald Loui

Sorry to post again -- but reading readers' comments, it's easy to see where they go wrong: if you've ever lived in HNL or LA, you realize that the cool evenings have a lot to do with restoring balance to temps without putting stress on the grid. If people don't believe the PER CAPITA scores, just compare your utility bills with those of an LA relative some day. I did, and I learned a lot about the cost of bad weather. Also, for every breadwinner on the Ventura Freeway at 8am, there are three or four people at home living within very modest circumferences. Do people realize how many old folks there are in Hawaii who live modest lives? PER CAPITA means everyone goes in the denominator, not just the ones with the cars.

Ronald Loui

Well, the per-capita elective travel by auto is small in both Honolulu and LA. People go to work and they spend the rest of their time in the houses they can't really afford. Also, these carbon footprint numbers are really starting to show how important it is not to have big metro Winter heating costs.

The incentives are backwards, unfortunately. People will want to move North to avoid global weirding, immigrants, and water shortages, but the environmental externalities of home heating are considerably underpriced. The simple fact is that technology can turn heat and sun into energy, but it can't do squat with cold, dark winter. Cold is, by definition, I am afraid, the lack of potential energy.


Lately there have been a few studies making the news that LA is among the "greenest" cities in the US. It's actually really surprising, but then, great weather definitely has a lot to do with it. NYC is a place where they have all four seasons, except all four seasons are terrible. The energy used up for heating and air conditioning (and new yorkers leave it on all day if not all week) in NYC is outrageous. I's probably is in LA's favor that car emission standards are improving.



Ray NY

Camarillo likely lives in one of the three or four beach cities that have a pedestrian environment. Lucky him I suppose. And he's right, while the need for AC immediately along the coast was almost never required - yet, we did have a blast of hot air that reached the beach in 2006 emptying every big box retailer of in-window air-conditioning units (the shape of the new climate? perhaps). Yet his description of a HIGH of 76 and a low of 60 doesn't paint a true picture, nor hold up only 5 or so miles in-land. Camarillo - I suggest you tell it to the readers in Camarillo or Pasadena, CA that So Cal offers a routine 76/60 temp - Doubtful that such is summer experience for most Angelinos? The facts are the sprawling So. Cal. is a sweltering desert - browning out like any big city. Sure people throughout have bungalow homes with central air, SUVs, pools. That's precisely the point. Energy wasted.


Hardly surprising. As a life-long Californian, I have never had air-conditioning (Suck it Ray in NY, I had a high of 76 and a low of 60. AC needed by the beech? Maybe Jones beach, but not here Ray). Never needed it. I can make it to LAX in less than an hour, and I have gone years with out using a heater. No, SoCal isn't paradise, nor is it for everyone, but I love living in a bungalow, couldn't imagine living too far from the ocean, and I walk most places I go in my suburban city, so I can exercise and take the dog. I don't own a heavy coat. Most Californians refuse to defend CA because it is thought that it only encourages more NYers to relocate, but I love my state, despite its wrong-headed courts, idiotic local government, socialist state government, incompetent government workers (CA gov't will hire morons)and the large number of annoying English.
I love NY, but I'm just there to see the sights, catch Letterman live, eat a Sabrets dog and hit a museum or two. Live there? Sorry, I like to see the sky.

Capt G

prg88 has it about right. Another case of drawing your graph first and then plotting your data points. Doubly laughable when one considers the various factors that qualify one for "green-ness".

Ray NY

As a 20 year resident of LA having just exchanged two cars for two NYC Transit Metro Cards, I can't say I see how this report adds up. I love both cities but I have to weigh in on this one.Ronald, respectfully, I never was without my car in LA. Never. And I don't know a soul who could do without one. When I moved to California in 86, we could barely see the end of the street in summer as the smog was so bad. Today cars are cleaner and the smog has receded to a more invisible collection of particulates, yet vehicle ownership has exploded and the congestion has risen. It's 100x worse. The length of routine trips have become ridiculously long to render entire sections of the city inaccessible. There is NO OTHER WAY to get around in Los Angeles. It doesn't matter what errand, one needs a car.Sure there are almost 260K rail riders and another 1.4M riding the bus in LA county. The three county Metrolink system carries less than 50K into downtown LA every day. When one combines with other services not mentioned this adds up to what... around 2.5M in the LA area efficiently moving about using transit? Poor performance.Compare this with the MTA and NJ Transit (collectively) moving nearly 16 million passengers every day on tracks and routes laid 100 years ago! One is left dumbfounded by the THOUGHT that LA would even register with these transit numbers. I'm not sure I'd call it an inferiority complex.Densities - let's compare: NY DMA 1,818 per sq. mi. vs. LA DMA 356 - Hardly a match up. Would like to know what the 'study area was' when this report concluded LA had high densities. If one looks at only the cities NYC: 27,282 per sq. mi. vs. 8,205/sq mi. Again hardly a contest. And I am certain surrounding 'burbs' are much denser in the NY area. People live in smaller spaces in the east than in LA.Drive to Work Alone: 72% in LA; vs. 55% in NY. (These are outdoor ad stats). Again a big gap. There is hardly an incentive in LA to car pool - other than the use of a few express lanes and a shared parking expense. In the NY area there is very real financial incentive.Total vehicles: 10,719,838 in LA (1.9 per HH) vs. 9,796,434 in NY (1.3 per HH) A noticable difference given the population variance between the two areas.Ronald, So Cal energy bills are low as the region enjoys have the lion's share of hydro power coming out of the Hoover Dam Reclamation project. Cheap Hydro fuels the whirring air-conditioners that are a MUST for months in the coastal valleys (and in the last few years along the Pacific Beaches!). While So. Cal's energy sources run from the extremely dirty (coal) to the extremely carbon clean (wind, hydro, nuclear); I am not sure the NYC energy mix is all that different (hydro, coal, nuclear). Finally, the carbon offsets don't add up either. I have been amazed by how green New York is - almost immediately outside the city. Los Angeles by comparison is a laughable artificial oasis - planting of trees for decorative effect, elaborate corporate landscaping and sod lawns throughout the once scrub brush desert (mindlessly depleting valuable water resources in the process) brings this green claim to "preposterous."I don't see it.


"There is plenty of room for more concrete on the coast. Between Orange county and the city of San Diego, for example, lies little besides tomato farms and a military base. To save the planet, fire up the bulldozers."There is also a nuclear power plant there.

Dan Star

There is an overlooked fact about California power use. Though it is listed as a Green State, it gets most of its electricity from border states that, you guessed it, generate the electricity with coal-fired power plants! It simply exports its carbon footprint to other states.


Why is it so hard to get carbon data for local traffic? Can they not find out the amount of petrol (gas) sold in LA per month or per year? One can easily correlate that with carbon generated by local traffic.


Really the article's title ought to have added the words "according to one study". For everyone who is ridiculing the study because they did not include local traffic, 1) the inclusion of faulty/incomplete data sets would invalidate anything the study claimed, and the invalidation would go on unnoticed until someone else conducted the same study with better data or made public the potential for error. 2) The Economist did not hide this fact from you, it's laid out in a clear sentence. If you want more accurate environmental studies, I would recommend you don't search for them in a newsprint that focuses on economics and how events in the world at large affect the economies.newyorkisdirty - I'm offended by your take on New Yorkers.


based on the comments I have read here...New Yorkers have an inferiority complex. god forbid, something say another American city doesn't pale in comparison to the almighty manhattan. what a horrible place and horrible people.


Not counting local traffic! What a joke! Just because the statistics are bad does not mean that it should be completely overlooked. If the Brookings Institution tried harder at being thorough and sensibly modeled in local traffic, my guess is that pedestrian and public transport-driven New York would come out on top by a landslide...


Ignoring local traffic is a joke, especially if they consider highway driving as part of the "local" commute. And Spazny's post makes a great point, SoCal developers build houses that are just as huge and energy inefficient as East coast developers, they just do it on 1/8 acre lots instead of 1/2 acre lots. That means higher suburban density of 4,000 sq ft homes, all with the thermostat set to 72F 24 hours a day.And ignoring the effect of cars in California is like ignoring the effect of bulldozers in the Amazon...

UK alum

I know the Brookings Institute is very reputable; however, this report is flawed. It didn't take into account industrial pollution or car efficiency and local efforts and initiatives such as replacing all stop-lights with LED lights. Kentucky scored poorly because it has access to coal and has some of the cheapest energy prices in the nation. The area is also heavy AC/heat users due to the local climate. There is research and development to make coal cleaner, and this is and should be a national priority. Lexington has a vast array of trees, horse farms, and other carbon dioxide purifiers. This should also be taken into account. The simplest way to tell is to take the sniff test. The air is just fresher and cleaner here as compared to other cities, notably LA and NYC.


Claiming that a city is green because of low carbon emissions ignores the much more important considerations of air and water quality, as well as a host of other environmental concerns.


Ony a think tank could come across with such an astonishing conclusion about Los Anglees when not uncluding the most important factor in carbon footprint there - local traffic. If statistics for traffic and industry are less than accurate for Los Angeles, they are likely to be less than accurate for competing cities as well.

Two Bronx Cheers for Brookings!


I definetly applaud the emphasis on heating/air conditioning versus sprawl but I agree with McGee III that the article is a little too kind to Southern California.
I would love to read a few Economist articles constructivley critisizing our dismal freeway system.


"They excluded local traffic and industry because the statistics are bad." The dismissal of this missing data with a one-liner greatly undermines the validity of this commentary. As a former resident of LA, I can attest that one does not walk anywhere in that city; not to the bank, the park, the grocer, or even a neighbor's house. And one certainly does not take the freeway to do these things either. I'm highly dubious of the findings of the BI report and, given the Economist's historical attention to statistical rigidity, I also suspect the objectivity of this article.



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