July 18, 2007
D.C. Uses Less Gas Per Capita Than All States
Via Atrios, this little geographically motivated blog spat between Ben Adler at TAPPED and Brian Beutler, about whether New York or California has a better environmental record, misses the more important point: This study shows that it's Washington, DC that actually has the lowest per capita gasoline consumption of any place in the country, by an impressively wide margin.
We've certainly explored issues related to the relative greenness of densely populated urban environments, compared to sprawling suburbs filled with cars and freeways, before. DCist Ryan would no doubt back up Adler in the New York vs. California debate, and DCist Colin would chime in to stress the inherent value of Washington, D.C.'s well developed transit system -- even if he does like to complain about its shortcomings from time to time. In fairness, D.C. is obviously the only place in the linked study that is 100 percent urban, so naturally our gasoline consumption is going to be lower. But doesn't that just prove the larger point about urban development we've been arguing for some time? If this country is ever going to meaningfully reduce its dependency on oil and and its contribution to global climate change, it would do well to look upon the lifestyles of us dense city-dwelling folks as examples.
DCist Matt put together a nifty bubble graph to illustrate the data. Click on the link or the small graph at right to see D.C.'s small bubble versus everyone else's rather large one. Tip to Mac users -- this functions better in Safari than in Firefox.
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At least you half-heartedly acknowledge how utterly meaningless this data is.
I wonder how much of DC's greenness would be offset if they took into consideration all the people who make epic commutes to the city from other states.
Now were the stats gather based on how much gas was bought in the District, because that would highly skew the figures in the Districts favor. Because everybody knows you don’t buy gas in DC, you go to VA and MD. And with a small population size that can make a huge difference between measured consumption and actual consumption. I never understood studies that compare DC with other states…apples and oranges…more like watermelon and raisins.
Also: are these stats based purely on gas sold through stations to the general public or gas consumed en toto? Because if the latter, there's a good chance that agricultural use is also skewing the chart.
I've also noticed the alarming rise in the number of drownings that parallel the rise in the sale of ice cream. Clearly, Jim Graham needs to look into proposing some bold legislation to hold ice cream sellers accountable.
It's hard to tell for sure, but I think the gas data is based on wholesale sales of gasoline, which would include ag.
It's a good thing we have eco-terrorists incapacitating the mega-SUV's of loosers that live with their mom. Without their actions, there is no way our stats would be so good.
A more telling study shows that the District ranks 29th in energy consumption/person (VA 26, MD 41).
http://www.eia.doe.gov/emeu/states/sep_sum/plain_html/rank_use_per_cap.html.
If we're going to complain that it's not legitimate to compare the District to other states when we end up doing poorly on some statistical measure or other, we can't turn around and trumpet the results when we do "well" without seeming like complete hypocrites.
That's because the workers in the government offices, and in DOE in particular, leave the lights in their offices on ALL NIGHT LONG.