Opinion: It’s time to plan for a steady-state, sustainable community

I guess that, with my math and engineering background, I’m always looking at the numbers. These recent news stories got me going:

On Dec. 2, The Denver Post covered RTD’s report on its July/August “Zero Fare for Cleaner Air” program. Allowing people to ride for free in July and August cost RTD $15.2 million in lost fares and other expenses. It reduced emissions by more than 6 million pounds (3,000 tons).

But Colorado’s Greenhouse Gas Reduction Roadmap calls for a CO2 emissions reduction of 12.7 million tons per year by 2030. The Zero Fare program’s reduction, if done for a full year, would reduce emissions by only 0.14% of what’s needed. This reduction cost is around $5,000 per ton, about 27 times the social cost of carbon dioxide, currently $185 per ton, according to Resources for the Future’s 2022 report. 

Zero Fare reduced vehicle miles traveled by 145,000 miles per day, almost unnoticeable compared to the Denver area total of around 84 million miles per day, according to the Denver Regional Council of Government’s 2020 report.

An Oct. 6, 2022, Denver Gazette article stated, “The Denver metro area was one of the country’s five fastest-growing large regions between 2010 and 2020.” Their report on the University of Minnesota “access to destination” study stated, “The latest results, using 2019 data, show that metro Denver residents could reach 55% of the area’s jobs within 30 minutes if they traveled by car. But if they were using transit, Denver’s workers could only get to 1.39% of the area’s jobs within 30 minutes.

“Even if doubling the transit system’s reach could double transit’s share by the year 2050, that would still make only 14% of jobs reachable after a 50-minute transit commute. The majority of workers will still be commuting by car in the coming decades — even if transit use doubles and working from home continues to grow.”

By the way, Colorado’s GHG Pollution Reduction Roadmap targets a 50% emissions reduction by 2030 from 2021.

Meanwhile, a Dec. 5 Denver Post headline stated, “Can state dodge recession again?”, with the measure being job gains. The folks at CU’s Leeds School of Business see slower job growth, so far at 1.1% annual pace, as a negative indicator, at least per the story. But unemployment is already down to 3.3%, well below average. Do the business folks fantasize that population/job growth must go on forever?

Locally, the Redtail Ridge development in Louisville is back again in the review process. It would add more than two million square feet of commercial space, including lots of flex office space, near U.S. 36. That will house many thousands of workers, all of whom will need homes, with many or most driving to work. But in Denver, downtown office vacancy rates hit 30% in the third quarter. Does this make any sense at all?

The CDC’s latest numbers that I could find are that in 2021 in the U.S. there were 3,664,292 births and 3,464,231 deaths, in a population of 336,997,624. That’s a growth rate of 0.06% per year. But Colorado’s was at about 0.5% for the last two years. About 1.5 million people legally immigrated to the U.S. in 2021, about an increase of 0.45%, or over seven times the “natural” growth rate. That’s just not sustainable long-term.

So where does all this leave us? In my opinion, we need real comprehensive planning focusing on a clean, steady-state economy, not one based on population, jobs and consumption growth. The easiest first steps include net-zero emissions from all buildings (including offsetting any new emissions), and net-zero increase in auto use (again offsetting any new trips). For power supply, get to mostly renewables as fast as possible, which first means shutting all coal plants, like Xcel’s Comanche 3, now!

Then drop the fantasy of densification — it adds people, construction, vehicle trips, food production, water consumption, etc. — so it is almost impossible to do in a climate-, resource- and traffic-neutral way. So why continue to fantasize about it? Just stop growing!

To get a steady-state, sustainable future would require our governments to take serious action. Here in Colorado, we have plenty of smart people and a state government that is not paralyzed by the partisan divide. And at least the Boulder County governments seem plenty capable of thinking this through if they decided that it was where we need and they wanted to go.

Without this, the climate crisis will overwhelm us and we will be cooked, literally and figuratively. Let’s have Colorado become the first clean, steady-state, sustainable state, and be an example for the rest!

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