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[meme] How would you rather see this land developed? (lemmy.world)

submitted 2 years ago by Fried_out_Kombi@lemmy.world to c/fuckcars@lemmy.world

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[+] oleorun@lemmy.fan -6 points 2 years ago* (last edited 2 years ago) (3 children)

Density reduces emissions

I reply to your infographic with a scientific paper that shows higher densities lead to higher CO2 emissions: https://www.mdpi.com/2073-4433/12/9/1193#:~:text=Regarding%20CO2%20emissions%2C%20the,density%2C%20the%20higher%20the%20emissions.

This study was done in Spain.

Another study, in Nature, also shows that lower density is better for reducing carbon emissions and climate change. https://www.nature.com/articles/s42949-021-00034-w

Sorry, but you and your infographic/sources are not supported by science.

[–] baseless_discourse@mander.xyz 12 points 2 years ago* (last edited 2 years ago)

Literally the frist sentence in the abstract:

More than 50% of the world’s population lives in cities. Its buildings consume more than a third of the energy and generate 40% of the emissions.

"higher densities lead to higher CO2 emissions" you say...

[–] Fried_out_Kombi@lemmy.world 10 points 2 years ago* (last edited 2 years ago)

https://coolclimate.org/maps

Feel free to zoom in on essentially every city in America. You can even download the raw data yourself.

Further, your Nature study you link, actually read the paper and you find this nugget:

These limiting assumptions were necessary based upon the urban scale scope of this study. Providing additional levels of detail at the building scale would greatly improve the accuracy of the analysis and can be refined in future works. Employing a cradle-to-cradle approach to consider resource reuse, the impact of retrofitting existing building stock over rebuilding; the inclusion of transportation impacts; adding a dynamic time component to investigate material inflows and outflows; and including a detailed time-related analysis of carbon sequestration potential offered by urban greeneries in the simulated environments—are all valuable and important avenues for future work to build on this study and expand its relevance while reducing its limitations. This study therefore acts as a stepping-stone to provide a strong foundation from which extensive future work can be born.

It literally doesn't even model transportation emissions. Considering this whole conversation is about sprawl causing more cars, this is kinda a glaring omission.

[–] ForgetPrimacy@lemmygrad.ml -2 points 2 years ago (1 children)

I'd like to come back and read over this later. The point OP is making seems pretty obvious but it is quite directly contradicted by the sources you just provided. I want to read those later

[–] Fried_out_Kombi@lemmy.world 5 points 2 years ago

From a quick read of the Nature article they posted:

These limiting assumptions were necessary based upon the urban scale scope of this study. Providing additional levels of detail at the building scale would greatly improve the accuracy of the analysis and can be refined in future works. Employing a cradle-to-cradle approach to consider resource reuse, the impact of retrofitting existing building stock over rebuilding; the inclusion of transportation impacts; adding a dynamic time component to investigate material inflows and outflows; and including a detailed time-related analysis of carbon sequestration potential offered by urban greeneries in the simulated environments—are all valuable and important avenues for future work to build on this study and expand its relevance while reducing its limitations. This study therefore acts as a stepping-stone to provide a strong foundation from which extensive future work can be born.

It doesn't even model transportation emissions, which kinda makes it worthless in the context of this discussion.

As for Spain, does Spain even have much "suburbia" as we understand it in a North American context? Data for cities in Spain may have nothing to say about the emissions of suburban sprawl vs denser communities, which is what the OP is mainly about.