How Do You Get Out of Climate Debt?
Purity tests will only stand in the way of making real progress on curbing emissions.
Last week, I shared a post highlighting a graphic from CNU and Dover, Kohl & Partners showing a four-image rendering concepting how to urbanize a suburban strip mall.
The post got overall good feedback. But where there was negative feedback, it largely came in various forms of “not good enough.” Some asked “Why not just remove all the parking and roads?” Others pointed out that trees would be sacrificed to build the new structures. Others still observed that tearing down existing buildings (like those featured in the top-left corner) would emit carbon emissions, and any policy that emits any carbon at this point can’t possibly be an environmental positive.
And that last point stuck with me, because it essentially asks what I believe to be a central and crucial question: Are urbanist policies with short-term negative emissions impacts worthwhile if they produce a net positive outcome?
Perhaps to some the answer seems simple and obvious. But for as often as I’m having this very conversation with others in this space, I felt it worthwhile to lay out the case for the “tradeoff approach.”
The way I find it most helpful to frame this is through the lens of “getting out of debt.” You’d be hard-pressed to find an urbanist of any stripe who doesn’t feel we’ve racked up an overwhelming “climate debt.”
So if you’re going to get out of climate debt, how do you do it?
It sounds reasonable enough to suggest that anything that adds to that debt should be off the table. But when we say “adds emissions,” we need to make sure we’re not becoming a victim of false choices.
When we suggest that tearing down a strip mall to create a dense, walkable, mixed-use neighborhood “emits carbon emissions,” it’s not incorrect. But resisting short-term losses for significantly greater long-term gains plays into the false choice that there is a real and practical alternative that sees no short-term emissions.
While it’s true that “the greenest building is the one that’s already been built,” it’s also often true that leaving a specific structure in place can be a barrier to an overall greener built environment.
And with transportation consistently ranking as the single largest source of carbon emissions, replacing the “greenest building” as part of overhauling an entire area to reduce/eliminate the need for cars and promote density effectively puts a significant “dent” in the climate debt of any action we have available.
To suggest otherwise is the equivalent of saying that trading $1 for $100 “still lost you money” because you didn’t simply receive the $100 dollars.
A criticism of this framework suggests that the action is too small. It fails to do the comprehensive work necessary to really make change.
But the greatest change we can make is accepting these same tradeoffs in thousands of sprawling towns across the continent. Replicate incremental gains thousands of times, and you’ve gone from making a minor dent to significantly knocking your debt down to a manageable number.
As nice as it would be to snap our policy fingers and fix the mess we’ve made, it’s unfortunately not an option that’s on the table. That means we’re left debt snowballing our way out of the climate crisis one strip mall and one town at a time.
So let’s do it. Fighting it only puts us further in the hole.
Thanks for your writing, Michael. I'm a recent subscriber and enjoying it so far.
I think an objective perspective towards this issue might consider the net carbon emissions of a project through a time-value lens, similar to that of a discounted cash flow model. The change might cost us 10 units of emissions today, but it saves us 2 units of emissions each year going forward. It's important not just to consider the net emissions, but the rate at which that reduction is achieved. The purely emissions-motivated investor would invest in the projects that return the greatest time-adjusted reduction in emissions.
Of course, this could become a rabbit hole of over-analyzing and letting perfect be the enemy of progress.