[tialaramex]

US energy use is very high for a number of reasons and energy use will tend to drive CO2 emissions. If you just use electricity (we'll get to that) you can maybe make an order of magnitude difference and maybe if you work very hard, which we need to, two orders of magnitude but that's all you can hope for. That's from 1kg/kWh which is roughly where coal power is, to 100g/kWh and then (very hard) to 10g/kWh with power sources that produce CO2 mainly during construction then amortized over their lifetime.

So if you start out using many times more energy than other countries per capita, you'll struggle to equal them on CO2 emissions even if that's a core policy goal.

The low population density in much of the US drives increased energy usage. I will walk to the nearby grocery store in a few minutes to buy my week's groceries, many Americans will drive, perhaps as much as an hour, to buy their groceries, it's not as though eating is optional. And this low density also forces bad energy source choices (e.g. using wood fires to keep warm seems pretty reasonable when there is no mains electricity out where you live even though of course it's very inefficient)

But to be fair consumerism does not help. Americans have been somewhat resistant to energy efficiency technologies that took off elsewhere, consumption is a sign of wealth and success and so efficiency is in that sense "bad". The entire city of Las Vegas is clearly a terrible idea from an energy efficiency point of view, why would you build a city in a desert?

[ced]

The low population density in much of the US drives increased energy usage.

80% of the US lives in "urban" areas (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Urbanization_in_the_United_Sta...), and that's where most of the emissions are from. It's not geography that causes the low density, it's urban sprawl and culture. Eating might not be optional, but living in a car-centric low-density neighborhood definitely is. It's one of the things our ancestors would consider a luxury, and which our ever-comparing north american minds now treat as a basic necessity.

[borg_]

Thanks for providing this perspective!

I think it would be super interesting to look at CO2 emission per capita broken down by states (i.e. perhaps states along the coasts would show a very different picture than less populated states).

309 people per mi2 (France) vs 421 for the NY state.

[cagenut]

even better, by zipcode: https://coolclimate.org/maps

its astonishing how the difference between "live in a city" and "live in the suburbs outside a city" is more than 3:1

[bzbarsky]

Without controlling for income, it's hard to draw good conclusions here. Looking at the area I am familiar with (Boston and its inner suburbs), CO2 emissions seem to correlate pretty well with income for areas which are a similar distance from downtown Boston and similarly dense/built-up.

Of course there's the open question of whether something like Brookline or even more so Cambridge or Somerville count as "suburbs outside a city".

[ed312]

Also from the area, I get the sense that the Boston area is generally increasing in carbon efficiency (at least pre covid). There simply isn't space to build more/bigger highways into Boston, the only feasible way to expand capacity is increasing density and more transit/biking.