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.