If you’re dead set on reducing your personal production of greenhouse gases, it may be better to move to San Diego than to the nearest urban core. According to economists Edward L. Glaeser (Harvard) and Matthew E. Kahn (UCLA), the cost of average household CO2 emissions in the US – from driving, public transit, home heading, and household electricity usage – range from a low of $1148 per year in San Diego up to $2015 in Memphis. That’s an $867 difference, whereas in New York City the difference between a suburban and an in-town household is only $289. (The suburb-city difference is smaller everywhere else.)

Every discipline has its own “gray literature” — papers that circulate without benefit of formal publication, these days usually on the internet. You can read and critique Glaeser and Kahn’s work at the National Bureau of Economic Research as working paper #14238. The abstract is here – for more you have to pay or be part of an institution (such as Notre Dame) that subscribes.

If you want more, a trio of papers from Georgia Tech and the Brookings Institution has it:

Frank Southworth, Anthon Sonnenberg, and Marilyn A. Brown, “The Transportation Energy and Carbon Footprints of the 100 Largest U.S. Metropolitan Areas,” Working Paper #37 at Georgia Tech’s School of Public Policy.
Abstract here, full paper here.

Marilyn A. Brown and Elise Logan, “The Residential Energy and Carbon Footprints of the 100 Largest U.S. Metropolitan Areas,” Working Paper #39 at Georgia Tech’s Ivan Allen College. Abstract here, full paper here.

Andrea Sarzynski, Marilyn A. Brown, and Frank Southworth, Shrinking the Carbon Footprint of Metropolitan America.

“Metros and the built environment are often neglected when solutions to the climate challenge are being discussed,” write Brown and Logan in #39, “yet they are major carbon emitters and they are poised to be part of the solution.” Brown and Logan quantify the per capita emissions of the 100 largest metropolitan areas, from Akron to New York City to Youngstown. They find that “Residential carbon footprints are smaller in metro areas with higher population concentrations and higher population densities, fewer cooling degree-days, fewer heating degree-days, higher electricity prices, and at least 10 miles of rail transit. . . . each additional person per square acre of developable land decreases the average per capita carbon footprint by 0.18 metric tons or 8 percent.”

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