Can Environmentalists Be Their Own Worst Enemy?
Harvard economist Ed Glaeser notes at The New York Times that many current local environmental causes are, in light of global warming, actually bad for the environment. He mentions the highly publicized issue of the Alliance to Protect Nantucket Sound fighting against a wind farm off of Cape Cod, as well as national opposition to hydroelectric power, respectively. “In these cases, groups are putting local environmental concerns first and the planet second,” he writes. (He also includes anti-nuclear energy activism, which I think is a bad example, since the environmental impact of an accident or terrorist attack at a nuclear plant would be, though local, legitimately terrible, and the evidence that nuclear power can be economically sustainable without massive government subsidies is mixed, at best.)
Of particular relevance to urbanists is Glaeser’s inclusion of local opposition to housing development in cities and regions that are relatively low carbon emitters. Glaeser writes:
San Francisco is the greenest metropolitan area in the country. An average new home there emits about 38,000 pounds of carbon dioxide each year. Houston is the brownest area in the country. An average new home there emits about 68,000 pounds of carbon dioxide each year…. Environmentalists should, presumably, be out there lobbying for more homes in coastal California, but instead, for more than four decades, California environmental groups, such as Save the Bay, have fought new construction in the most temperate, lowest carbon-emission area of the country.
I see this problem not only between regions but within them. Presumably, if you are an environmentalist, you want to push as much new construction as possible into cities, near mass transit nodes, to cut down on driving and sprawl. But, as Ryan Avent points out at Portfolio, in D.C. neighborhood activists have tried to prevent the construction of a mixed-use, vertically integrated development on empty lots near the Brookland metro station. In Brooklyn the local Sierra Club opposed the Atlantic Yards proposal to put housing, office and retail towers and basketball arena over a subway station over eight subway lines and the Long Island Railroad.
Having grown up a few blocks from Atlantic Yards, I am torn about the proposal, partly for the Sierra Club’s reason: the air quality is already poor there due to all the traffic and it would become worse. Mostly, I opposed it for visceral NIMBY reasons. As an area resident, that’s perfectly appropriate. But if I were a professional environmental activist, should not my position be that it is better to have a lot more fans taking mass transit to games than driving to the Nets arena in New Jersey? As Glaeser argues, the “think global, act local” mantra needs to be revised in the age of global warming.
Ben Adler joins Next American City as an Urban Leaders Fellow based in Washington, D.C. He will be focusing on Washington and the role of the federal government in urban policy. Ben covered the 2008 election and Congress as a staff writer for Politico. Prior to joining Politico Ben was the editor of CampusProgress.org, a daily online political and cultural magazine at the Center for American Progress, a regular contributor to The American Prospect Online and its award-winning blog, TAPPED, and a reporter-researcher at The New Republic. His writing has also appeared in Newsweek, The Washington Monthly, In These Times, The Nation and the websites of The Guardian and The Atlantic among other publications.
Norman Oder on Wed, Apr 22, 2009 at 3:24pm
The Atlantic Yards debate is a lot more complicated. Probably the biggest issue is the process; e.g., dubious findings of blight; no local elected official has a say.
But to the point of this post, the choice is not between an antiquated arena with (for now) no public transit access and a yet-unbuilt arena in Brooklyn. Remember, there’s a new arena in Newark accessible to transit.
And the argument made in 2003 for Atlantic Yards—let’s poach tax revenues from New Jersey, while gaining $100M+ in federal subsidies to build an arena—seems somehow less compelling from a global (or at least federal) perspective.
What’s the environmentalist argument for subsidizing sports facilities?
As for NIMBY tendencies, keep in mind that Atlantic Yards opponents support an alternative that would be high-density but less dense than the announced (but now highly unlikely) Atlantic Yards plan, and would cover a smaller footprint.
Norman Oder on Wed, Apr 22, 2009 at 3:28pm
One more thing. Atlantic Yards would so not be “over a subway station over eight subway lines and the Long Island Railroad.”
More here:
http://atlanticyardsreport.blogspot.com/2009/01/some-common-and-less-common-mistakes-in.html
Ben Adler on Wed, Apr 22, 2009 at 9:03pm
Norman,
I grew up five blocks from the corner of the proposed Atlantic Yards site, so I don’t need any corrections on its accessibility to the subway. For the record, the arena itself would be over the railroad tracks, the other buildings would be in the rest of the footprint. Anyway, “over” the subway in this case does not need to to mean literally at the exit from it. Anywhere in the development would be walking distance from all the subway lines that stop at Atlantic Ave or Pacific St (I count eight: 2,3,4,5,B,Q,N,R,W.) The Lafayette stop on the C or G would not be that far away as well. This does not mean I am an advocate of Atlantic Yards. I don’t want a sports arena near my house, and I think that the plan to create a super-block is antithetical to walkable urbanism. Some of the other complaints, such as the misuse of eminent domain that you reference, are legitimate concerns as well, although that is not germane to the question of reducing the region’s carbon footprint.
But you seem to willfully miss the larger point I raise. People who live near all those subways, or work near all those subways, will drive less than if they lived or worked in the suburbs or even in Canarsie. I highly doubt that the Newark arena would get as many people to come by transit. Most of the fans would probably come from suburbs in New Jersey and would drive. You can argue that Atlantic Yards is a bad proposal for the immediate community, and I am sympathetic to that argument. But to contradict the obvious fact that it would be a net revenue reduction in carbon emissions is to deny a fact that you find inconvenient.
Norman Oder on Wed, Apr 22, 2009 at 9:38pm
Ben,
I wasn’t correcting the issue of accessibility to the subway. I was correcting the notion, brought on by journalistic shorthand, that the whole project would be over the subway. That shorthand makes the project sound like a no-brainer—just pop it over the subway and all will be well—for people who haven’t seen the map or walked the area.
I don’t think I willfully miss the larger point. Sure, high-density development near transit hubs is a good idea. That’s why I mentioned (but didn’t name) the UNITY plan as one recognition of that.
You wrote:
“But if I were a professional environmental activist, should not my position be that it is better to have a lot more fans taking mass transit to games than driving to the Nets arena in New Jersey?”
The Newark arena already draws significantly more people via mass transit than does the one in the Meadowlands.
Would a Brooklyn arena draw even more people by mass transit? Sure.
But it hasn’t been built, and there’s a set of fiscal and environmental trade-offs in constructing it in the first place.
The Sierra Club’s opposition, btw, included a legal challenge to the project’s environmental review—a challenge that, though unsuccessful in court, led to a judge using the term “ludicrous” to describe the state’s position on blight.
While some urban planners (such as RPA) endorsed Atlantic Yards because it would be a high-density project near a transit hub, the inquiry shouldn’t stop there.
Atlantic Yards was a take-it-or-leave-it proposal approved by the state, bypassing the city’s land use review procedure. Given the opposition, the city and state have learned some lessons about civic engagement from this.
I’‘m sympathetic to the argument that not every community can get its way, and that some have to absorb more density than they might have liked. But ends can’t be divorced from means, which is why Atlantic Yards has been so controversial even beyond the immediate community.
George Coumaris in DC on Sun, Apr 26, 2009 at 10:40am
The old city of DC (the L’Enfant Plan) is currently one of the few green inner urban areas. From K Street to Florida Avenue still has the necessary tree canopy to make the air somewhat healthy. The irony is that self-designated “smart” growth people keep pushing for more and more concrete in this area on the theory that it will stop exurbs. DC has 83 metro stations and there should be a push to develop each of them somewhat equally not continually increase the concentration in the dozen that are currently the most trendy while others lie bare. This isn’t smart growth, this is laissez-faire and yet another shill for developers.