carbon emissions

Exurban migration demands fiber delivered advanced telecom infrastructure, EVs

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Growth on the urban periphery, while a boon for housing affordability, comes with environmental costs, chewing up farmland and perpetuating the car-centric lifestyles that are a significant contributor to climate change. California, for instance, has a goal to cut greenhouse gas emissions 40 percent below 1990 levels by 2030, but has found it increasingly out of reach as home prices have pushed workers farther from the urban core, where they drive more. In theory, if more people work from home, even in if more people work from home, even in a hybrid capacity, it would offset some of those emissions by cutting down daily commutes. But the farther people get from the urban density and public transportation, the more dependent they become on cars even for short trips.

Source: House Hunters Are Leaving the City, and Builders Can’t Keep Up – The New York Times

As per previous posts on this blog, fiber delivered advanced telecom is the essential utility for knowledge workers migrating to the exurbs. That replaces the need for long commutes and related carbon emissions. But as this NYT piece points out, personal vehicles are still needed for short trips — a need that can be met with EVs.

CalEPA growing, must cut cubicles for regulators | The Sacramento Bee

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California can’t fit all of its environmental regulators in its 25-story Environmental Protection Agency headquarters, and it doesn’t want to shell out tens of millions of dollars to find them new digs, either.Gov. Jerry Brown’s administration found a solution that will sound familiar to any longtime traveler squeezing his knees into tight airplane seats: His agency wants to slash the size of standard cubicles in the EPA headquarters.The administration is asking lawmakers to set aside $23 million in next year’s budget to gradually reconfigure the headquarters so it can fit another 1,100 workers in downtown Sacramento. The headquarters today has 2,800 cubicles.


Source: CalEPA growing, must cut cubicles for regulators | The Sacramento Bee

There’s another way of dealing with this problem: Having staff work outside of the centralized, commute-in office in home offices and neighborhood co-working spaces. Despite state policy dating back to the late 1980s, the state continues to operate as if it were 1975 and there was no Internet or today’s advanced information and communications technologies, requiring staff to report daily to cubicle farms.

One might think the frugal Brown administration would be eager to avoid the cost of “officing” all those state workers. Not to mention the transportation demand they create and associated carbon emissions the Brown administration wants to reduce.

Long commutes to reach affordable housing blamed for hampering California’s ability to reduce greenhouse gas emissions

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California has hit a speedbump in its efforts to reduce greenhouse gas (GHG) emissions under landmark environmental legislation enacted in 2006 to slow carbon dioxide emissions and their contribution to global warming, concludes a recent report issued by the San Francisco-based nonprofit organization Next 10. It found that while the state has made progress in reducing carbon dioxide emissions relative to economic growth, pollutants from motor vehicles have increased.

“In 2015, total transportation-related GHG emissions rose by 2.7 percent, largely due to an increase of 3.1 percent in emissions from on-road vehicles like cars, trucks and buses,” Next 10 stated in a news release. “This increase seems to be a result of a strong economy and lower gas prices resulting in more vehicles on the road, combined with a housing crisis that has led to longer commutes.”

California’s housing crisis has been building since the 1960s and is a longstanding problem in the Golden State, which has some of the highest housing costs in the United States. High housing costs force people into longer and longer commutes in search of affordable housing in communities increasingly distant from their workplaces since proximity to metro centers tends to positively correlate with higher home and rental prices. No environmental legislation can remedy this fundamental economic reality.

Instead, it requires a shift in thinking away from the Industrial Age model of where and how we live and work – reinforced by automobiles, cheap fuel and multi lane highways built in the latter half of the 20th century that drive GHG emissions – to a new mindset for the information-based socio-economy of the 21st century.

Why? Because many of those commuters are knowledge workers who thanks to advances in information and communications technology (ICT) over the past two decades no longer need to regularly work in a commute-in office located far from their residential communities. The electronic tools they need to do their jobs work just as well in a home office or a community-based satellite office or shared co-working center as they do in a centralized, commute in office. And there are lots of collaboration apps and tools to enable knowledge workers to stay in touch with colleagues and customers. Reducing unnecessary daily commute trips will go a long way toward helping California get back on the road toward meeting its GHG reduction goals.