So... California should pursue YIMBY policies to incorporate population growth so that the other 49 can keep population grown to a minimum (ie., can say No to YIMBY policies)?
When people leave California, because there is not enough housing, and move to Texas, which sprawls into floodplains, they double or triple their greenhouse gas emissions. Even with all the greenhouse gases from super-commutes, I prefer to have people stay in California.
Texas has very high per capita carbon emissions, but Oregon and Washington, which is where a lot of the complaining comes from, are pretty comparable to California.
Now, city dwellers do evidently have lower carbon emissions per capita. As you can see from the chart, New York state and Washington DC have very low carbon emissions per capita, driven by large urban populations.
California does have a favorable climate that keeps energy use and emissions down. But so does much of the Northwest, and urbanization clearly has a lot to do with per capita emissions.
In short, if you're concerned about carbon emissions, you should probably support density everywhere, not just in California.
Those are interesting links. For me, San Francisco's decision to demolish the Fillmore comes to mind immediately when reading the bit on living vs mechanical cities. SF's ultimately (Imo) harmful decision to require garages and parking also seems to fall under the mechanical rather than living city idea (http://www.spur.org/publications/urbanist-article/2008-06-01...)
Your links about where people move are interesting, but I don't think they support the notion that the big problem is people moving out of California per se. California "keeps" a very high percent of it's population - only Michigan and Texas are higher. This is a little tricky to measure - California (and Texas) are big states, with several large urban centers. When someone moves from SF to Los Angeles (or from Dallas to Houston), that's considered in "in-state" move, whereas when someone moves from New York to New Jersey, that's an out of state move. That could throw off the numbers. The links do show higher domestic out-migration from California in absolute numbers, but there's still a lot of in-migration as well (perhaps higher as a percentage of population? Not sure...). And Oregon and Washington are up high on the list of out as well as in-migration, even if they aren't at the absolute top (again, keep in mind, Texas is a big state - you'd expect a lot of movement between two large states like this).
One very important thing to keep in mind is from your link about "close access" and "contagion" cities. The idea (for anyone who doesn't want to follow, though I do encourage you to read the links) is that places like SF or LA are closed off because they're so expensive, but sprawl into inland California occurs.
Within this context, from an emissions point of view, Californians moving to Seattle or Portland could be more desirable than staying in CA if they're moving to sprawl inland. Then again, this may cause displacement into sprawl elsewhere.
I'm pretty sure we agree that it's undesirable for people to leave California (or sprawl into inland areas) because of NIMBY building codes. The part I can't get behind is that people should stay in California rather than moving elsewhere for carbon emissions purposes. The data you showed overwhelmingly supports the notion that certain types of density are desirable, but again, the notion that CA should pursue this kind of growth so that other cities don't have to (while the US accepts 1.2 million immigrants a year)? Nope, I completely reject that idea.
I support it here, but Seattle, Denver, Portland are going to need to grow, intelligently too. I'm not interested in doing this so others can keep people out.
