Suburbia and Climate Change

Back in December, The Atlantic Cities ran an article discussing the effects suburban settlement patterns has on climate change. The article, entitled The Missing Link of Climate Change: Single-Family Suburban Homes, discusses how smarter land use planning can drastically cut greenhouse gas emissions. Suburban developments are often built away from industrial and commercial centers, which creates the need to travel longer distances (compared to more mixed use or urban settlement patterns) for everything from commuting to work to buying groceries. As you can see in the chart above, energy use is much greater in suburban single family homes mainly due to transportation needs. The overarching message of the article may best be summarized by this excerpt:

...what if we could also simply reduce the miles people drive by in a sense pushing their many destinations closer together?

Google Releases Carbon Footprint

Internet giant Google has disclosed its carbon footprint. Google's total emissions in 2010 were just under 1.5 million tons of carbon dioxide. As a reference point, this is higher than the entire country of Laos and is similar to the United Nation's operational carbon footprint. On a brighter note, Google asserts that their data centers use half the energy as their industrial counterparts. In addition, cloud computing, which is what Gmail uses, greatly improves energy efficiency (when compared to services that must have dedicated servers). Other interesting numbers are: each Google search accounts for about 0.2g of carbon dioxide emitted while ten minutes of YouTube viewing equates to 1g of carbon dioxide emitted. For more information, visit Google Green.