Cities shouldn't reject growth in the name of climate mitigation By Matthew Yglesias

Cities shouldn't reject growth in the name of climate mitigation

By Matthew Yglesias

Building housing and transit is good despite construction emissions

In the United States, spending on mass transit is normally opposed by the political right, which is suspicious of spending money in general and has ideological and lifestyle objections to spending on mass transit in particular.

And beyond political opposition, American political institutions struggle to identify and fund projects that are cost-effective in terms of ridership. That’s in part because our construction costs are structurally very high, so even a project that would clearly generate large ridership (like Phase 2 of the Second Avenue Subway) has astronomical costs. And it’s partly because we have a land use paradigm that’s very hostile to transit usage, so we get things like Los Angeles building out a subway network without upzoning along the corridors.

In Germany, the cost situation is better and the historic land use patterns are different, so a city like Berlin has plenty of opportunities to pluck relatively low-hanging transit fruit.

Sadly, Alon Levy reports that in Berlin, opposition to this kind of expansion comes not from the political right (which is relatively unimportant in big city politics anyway) but from the left, especially the Green Party which has developed the view that U-Bahn expansion is bad for climate change. The logic is that expanding the U-Bahn involves pouring a lot of concrete, the embedded emissions in concrete are relatively high, and even a well-used mass transit project won’t necessarily displace a large enough number of car trips for the carbon math to pencil out.

Levy argues narrowly that the Greens are just miscalculating the emissions benefits of mass transit, offering the cross-sectional argument that “the scale of the difference in emissions between cities with and without extensive subway systems is too large for this to be possibly true.” Per capita emissions in New York, for example, are much lower than the American average. And Germany, which has much more extensive transit in its mid-sized cities than we do, has lower per capita emissions than the United States. Even within Germany, Berlin’s emissions are much lower than the national average.

I think that’s all correct, but it also doesn’t really get at a core issue here.

The Greens’ point is that concrete involves high emissions. So if you could get everyone to just stop building new stuff, that would achieve a lot of emissions reduction. The problem with this vision is that the impact on global living standards of nobody pouring any new concrete ever would be quite bleak. And very few people around the world are prepared to embrace the kind of degrowth ideology that would underwrite the idea that “don’t build any new stuff ever” is a reasonable solution to climate change. Instead, we see a selective application of degrowth ideology imposed not on the world writ large, but on arbitrary sub-sections of it in rich countries where environmentalists happen to have unusual amounts of political clout. And sometimes the result, as with blocking Berlin transit expansion, is environmentally perverse. Other times it’s economically tragic. But either way, it’s bad in a big-picture ideological sense, not just in a picky project-by-project sense.

The Berlin transit situation

Let’s start with Berlin. The city obviously has an unusual history, with its growth trajectory derailed by the Cold War situation. Among other things, that’s left it with a transit system that is a little underdeveloped in some slightly boring ways.

The neighborhood of Märkisches Viertel near the edge of the city, for example, has a big social housing development of 17,000 apartments that were built in the 1960s. And the development is kind of close to the Wittenau station where Line 1 of the S-Bahn stops and intersects with the terminus of Line 8 of the U-Bahn. But the station doesn’t genuinely serve the neighborhood. A very short extension of U8 would be easy to build, connect a dense neighborhood to a very high-quality mass transit network, and do a lot of good.

The presence of a good number of this kind of small opportunity distinguishes Berlin from D.C., where I live.

All of WMATA’s existing lines already terminate in fairly low-density suburban areas. You could extend these lines further, but that would only generate meaningful ridership if you paired it with significant land use changes. And in almost all cases, if you wanted to increase ridership by changing land use rules near suburban Metro stations, you could do that near the stations that already exist. Good WMATA expansion projects involve things that are relatively difficult and expensive, like new tunnels through the center of the city. I’d love to see that stuff happen, but it’s a different ballgame than Germany’s opportunity to extend existing lines into dense urban neighborhoods. Berlin also has the opportunity to do some short expansions that would have significant network benefits.

For example, U1 and U3 terminate at Warschauer Strasse in a very dense area. Building a 0.8-mile extension to Frankfurter Tor with one stop in the middle wouldn’t revolutionize transit access in the neighborhood, but it would create a lot of new opportunities to make useful transfers and take advantage of the city’s full network.

U3 in the southwest of the city, similarly, could benefit from a very short extension that would link it up with an S-Bahn line. Connections like these would let some people get around town faster, relieve some pressure on central city infrastructure, and ultimately increase system-wide capacity.

The point is that there are a bunch of projects in Berlin that have relatively large transportation benefits per unit of concrete poured.

Levy says that supporting growth — and particularly transit growth — in an already transit-rich city is worth the environmental cost of pouring that concrete. I think that is absolutely true. It’s only true, though, if you accept that in general growth is good, in which case the climate lens leads us to ask “what kind of new infrastructure is best for sustainability?” But if you talk yourself into the idea that maybe everyone will just give up on growth, then things look different.

Small, poor places have low emissions

While it’s true that Berlin has relatively low emissions compared to the rest of Germany, there’s a sense in which Germany as a whole is a catastrophic climate failure compared to places like Mexico, Indonesia, and Kenya.

Normal people don’t think this way — Indonesia hasn’t achieved lower emissions than Germany thanks to some clean energy revolution. Jakarta is making some belated investments in mass transit, but its system certainly isn’t better than Berlin’s. The secret to Indonesia’s emissions success is just that Indonesia is poor.

Per capita emissions are important for understanding the structure of national economies, but of course the atmosphere doesn’t care about per capita. And in terms of raw emissions, Germany’s big problem is that it’s not only rich, but it’s also a pretty large country.

This is just to say that if you’re monomaniacally obsessed with climate change rather than seeing it as one issue among several, the solution is clear: you want as few people as possible and you want them to be poor.

Despite a certain amount of rhetoric to the contrary, I think very few people actually are emissions monomaniacs. But the sporadic application of this line of thinking is an important trend in environmentalism. It’s given rise to the intellectual fad around degrowth, which is prominent enough to be a permanent fixture on op-ed pages, even if it doesn’t wield political influence. And, as we see in Berlin, it supports the notion that the left should apply degrowth logic to specific geographies where it wields an unusually large amount of political power.

The right way to look at Berlin is to say that Berlin is a good example of a relatively low-emissions place for a big, rich city, and if there are ways to grow Berlin’s population and economy while reinforcing its low-emissions characteristics, the city should embrace those opportunities. Small, high-value U-Bahn and S-Bahn expansions absolutely fit the bill, even though pouring concrete results in emissions. But a big part of the reason that’s the right answer in climate terms is that even if Berlin opts out of growth, the world isn’t going to. People who otherwise might live in Berlin and enjoy a convenient transit commute will live in the suburbs and enjoy the convenience of driving instead.

Some ideas that aren’t politically feasible on a global basis should be tried locally where the politics are different. American cities and states should try to move ahead with preschool for four-year-olds and child allowances for families, even if Build Back Better is dead in Congress. These are good policies on their own terms, and implementing them and making them work could have a politically useful demonstration effect. But “we can’t convince everyone to stop pouring concrete so we’ll just stop pouring concrete in our city” doesn’t have this quality. The concrete goes elsewhere — to worse projects — if you refuse to use it for good ones.

We need to try to solve the industrial emissions problem

Now all that said, the Berlin Greens are getting something important right — it’s a big problem for the dream of a net zero world that the greenhouse gas emissions associated with pouring concrete are so large.

It’s tempting to focus on the pieces of the emissions puzzle that have well-understood solutions and pretend that all we need is more political will. That’s how you get people throwing cans of soup in art museums and portraying the climate issue as one pitting narrow special interests against the will of the people. There are absolutely apsects of climate change that can be addressed with the application of willpower. We know that riding a metro has fewer emissions than driving your car, which is why cheap metro expansions that generate high ridership are a win. It’s also why liberalizing land use in places where there is abundant transit capacity is an easy win.

But we just do not currently have a feasible means of creating large amounts of zero-emissions concrete. And “just don’t do construction projects” isn’t an acceptable answer. A better answer, I think, is that with regulatory changes, we could use mass timber instead in many situations.

There are plenty of other promising lines of research in terms of industrial decarbonization. A British group has an idea about using waste heat from steel production to make cement, for example. There’s also the notion that you could burn pure hydrogen instead of hydrocarbons to generate industrial heat. Right now the economically dominant way of making hydrogen is to burn natural gas (“blue hydrogen”), but optimists think that if the installation costs of wind and solar power keep falling, it should be cheaper and cheaper to make hydrogen via electrolysis with the renewables as the source for the electricity. Then you could use “green hydrogen” in industrial processes.

There’s a concatenation of ifs there, but if it all worked out, this would be a way to in effect store the extra energy generated by wind/solar during peak production periods in order to solve other decarbonization programs. Will that pan out? I don’t know. The other big lines of research that I’m aware of are from a Swedish facility that’s at the leading edge of using carbon capture technology at the source to create a net zero plant. But in part precisely because it’s unclear whether any of this will ever pan out, I think it’s important to keep supporting direct air capture projects, which right now are too expensive to be commercially appealing at mass scale but which could cut some Gordian knots around these things.

Rather than “don’t build low-carbon transportation infrastructure because building things causes emissions,” the right answer is “yes, build low-carbon transportation infrastructure while also continuing to work on industrial decarbonization.”

Partial equilibrium doom

Just in advance of Thanksgiving, the New York Times published a profile of Les Knight, who is apparently an advocate for human extinction.

If I were to try to explain the difference between “media institutions have an ideological bias toward the left” and “media institutions are inverse versions of Fox News in terms of partisanship,” I think this story would be Exhibit A. The Times is clearly interested in platforming fringy and absurd leftist ideas in a way they’re not for the right. But at the same time, this platforming does no favors to the actually existing Democratic Party, which is led by a Biden administration that is focused on addressing climate change through industrial policy, technology-neutral innovation, and other growth-oriented strategies.

I myself didn’t know how to respond to the profile. If I’d seen lots of people praising Knight, I’d have argued with them. But I mostly just saw people dunking on him in one of those social media frenzies whereby everyone gets mad and it’s not clear if the thing they’re getting mad about is even important.

The main thing I think I’d say is that Knight-style ideas have basically no sway over any significant political domain, and it’s okay to not worry about them. But what’s true is that somewhat arbitrary splinters of anti-humanism lodge in little corners of the climate debate — like entertaining the hypothesis that maybe nobody should ever do any large-scale transportation projects and that’s why Berlin shouldn’t expand the U-Bahn. In America, the parallel error is that when D.C. adopts climate goals for the city, it focuses on reducing aggregate emissions rather than acknowledging that anything that increases D.C.’s population would reduce American emissions.

In other words, it’s not that anyone is actually adopting human extinction or degrowth as a climate strategy. But the leading-edge climate jurisdictions are declining to acknowledge that they care more about climate than most places, so anything they do to voluntarily curb local growth won’t solve the global climate issue and may not even be helpful. Adding people to a rich country’s transit-oriented cities and improving their transportation networks is very good climate policy if you take a global view of the situation and keep in mind that those cities are the places where the electorate is most interested in climate change. But that means making progress requires tuning out the eco-doomers and human extinction advocates — the world is going to keep growing whatever people who care about climate change say and do. By rejecting partial equilibrium doomer views, we can ensure it grows faster and greener than it otherwise might.