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.