Carbon dioxide emissions may create significant social harm because of global warming, yet American urban development tends to be in low density areas with very hot summers. In this paper, we attempt to quantify the carbon dioxide emissions associated with new construction in different locations across the country. We look at emissions from driving, public transit, home heating, and household electricity usage. We find that the lowest emissions areas are generally in California and that the highest emissions areas are in Texas and Oklahoma. There is a strong negative association between emissions and land use regulations. By restricting new development, the cleanest areas of the country would seem to be pushing new development towards places with higher emissions. Cities generally have significantly lower emissions than suburban areas, and the city-suburb gap is particularly large in older areas, like New York.
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Paper provided by National Bureau of Economic Research, Inc in its series NBER Working Papers with number
14238.
Length: Date of creation: Aug 2008 Date of revision: Handle: RePEc:nbr:nberwo:14238
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Find related papers by JEL classification: Q5 - Agricultural and Natural Resource Economics; Environmental and Ecological Economics - - Environmental Economics
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References listed on IDEAS Please report citation or reference errors to , or , if you are the registered author of the cited work, log in to your RePEc Author Service profile, click on "citations" and make appropriate adjustments.:
Marcy Burchfield & Henry G. Overman & Diego Puga & Matthew A. Turner, 2005.
"Causes of sprawl: A portrait from space,"
Working Papers
tecipa-192, University of Toronto, Department of Economics.
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