John Jensen

While the world's leaders are all in Copenhagen trying to come up with a plan to reduce CO2 emissions, our local municipalities are putting talk into action by preparing for reductions on a local basis.  One of the discussion points that I have noticed more than once is a linkage between income and GHG emissions -- that is, the richer a household is, the more CO2 it emits.  It's important to keep this in mind because the ideal plan for the future would be to reduce emissions while at the same time increasing income.  It's possible in other countries, why not here? To that end I thought I would look into the relationship between income and GHG emissions here among Metro Vancouver municipalities.  Using Statistics Canada's  community profile data and community energy and emissions inventory data from provincial government,  I put together this graph:
graph
The orange line is a least-squares regression of the relationship, which is not insignificant at 0.39. From reviewing it you can see that cities with the lowest median household incomes also have the lowest household GHG emissions.  Denser ones, like New Westminster and the City of North Vancouver, get an "extra" benefit.  Interestingly, we see that West Vancouver is actually doing a bit better than one would expect with GHG emissions when looking at their income.  The average District of North Vancouver household has about the same income in West Vancouver but produces two more tons of GHG emissions over the course of a year. The big outliers here are the most interesting -- Delta and Port Moody.  Both have the same level of income but Delta produces double the GHG emissions per household than Port Moody.  As a moderately denser community (Port Moody has 23 people per developable hectare as compared to 84 in the City of North Vancouver and 90 in Vancouver), as they densify they can push themselves fairly easily even further into the bottom right corner.  Other municipalities should take a look at what is going on in Port Moody as they are clearly doing something right.

It's about Washington D.C., but could as well be about anywhere:

But as you enjoy the fireworks on Tuesday, you should realize that the D.C. height restriction has also promoted suburban sprawl, boxified the city's architecture and deadened Washington's downtown. It has inflated office rents, deflated the municipal tax base, limited affordable housing, contributed to the region's hideous traffic jams and generally helped keep Washington a second-tier city despite the unrelenting growth of its major industry -- the government.

It's been a while since I've posted to the blog; most my public musings have been on my Twitter feed. I'll try to make up for that as I have a lot on my mind regarding current local political and economic issues. I hadn't taken the kids on one of our little min adventures for a while, so I thought we could pay a visit  to New Westminster.  We often drive through or near there, it's been a long time since we stopped for a visit. The first stop was the New Westminster Police Service museum, tucked in the corner of the lobby of their main building on Columbia Street.  There's some interesting police memorabilia -- the kids liked the jail cell, handcuffs, truncheon and Harley Davidson motorcycle.  It's clear that the service there is very proud of their local history as one of the few remaining city departments in the province. We then went to visit the historic Irving House, a mansion built in 1865 by a lumber and shipping baron who made his riches during the BC Gold Rush.  It's been beautifully maintained and is stuffed with perfectly-preserved Victorian furnishings.  It was good for the kids to see how easy it is to take things like indoor plumbing and central heating for granted, as even the super-wealthy of that era had to do with bedpans and hot water bottles.  From now until Christmas the house is decorated with all the Christmas trimmings, complete with a volunteer brass band in the parlor playing all the holiday favourites.  The volunteer tour guides are in period dress and are enthusiastic and knowledgeable.  Well worth a visit.