Net Zero vs Zero Building

Why blocking building is bad for the environment.

Well, that lasted long!

Within a few days of getting elected as MP for Waveney Valley, Green Party co-Leader Adrian Ramsay has come out against a major pylon project. Ramsay wants a ‘proper options’ assessment. He thinks it’s likely to say that the 100 miles or so of pylons planned between Norwich and Tilbury are unnecessary and that they should either be buried underground or be placed offshore altogether. When asked by Evan Davis what he’d do if this ‘proper options assessment’ found that pylons were the answer, he declined to answer.

In theory, the Green Party are in favour of generating electricity from the wind. In fact, their manifesto commits them to having wind produce around 70% of the UK’s electricity by 2030. The problem with wind power, like all forms of power, is you need to take that power from where it’s generated to where people actually want to use it. If you’re in favour of wind power but not in favour of the grid investments needed to bring that power to where it's needed, then you aren’t really in favour of wind power.

If Ramsay somehow wins his campaign for a ‘proper options assessment’ I suspect they will conclude that pylons are the best option. Burying a line underground costs between five and ten times more per km than running the same line across pylons. The existing options assessment (available online) from the National Grid found the overhead onshore option was both the cheapest option and the one that could be delivered fastest. The only real mark against it was the difficulty in getting planning permission – something which our new government plans to fix and our new Green MP opposes them on.

I share this story not to dunk on a politician’s hypocrisy – supporting green energy, while undermining it in a major way. I follow Matthew Ygleisias (and Norm MacDonald) on hypocrisy. The problem isn’t a politician having lofty ideals and not living up to them. It’s the NIMBYism itself. Rather I share this story to challenge a counter-productive mode of green thinking: the idea that making it easier for communities to block new buildings is, on net, good for the environment.

The status quo isn’t green

I’ve written before about the frequent (and costly) legal challenges that bog down new road building in Britain. The litigants typically argue that road building increases emissions not just because all that tarmac and concrete is energy-intensive, but also because better road infrastructure makes driving a more attractive option and means more cars on the road spewing CO2 from their tailpipes.

In the grand scheme of things, the impact of so-called ‘induced demand’ on total transport emissions is relatively marginal. Even in a Britain that goes on a massive road-building spree, most emissions will come from journeys driven on roads that already exist. This is why Britain Remade argues that, above all else, the focus should be on greening the fleet by accelerating the rollout of EVs.

But, even if your sole focus was modal shift (the jargon-y term for people switching from cars to other forms of transport) I don’t think stopping road-building should be near the top of your concerns. The real problem that people who want people to switch greener forms of transport have to address is that restrictive planning policies over decades have locked many of us into car-dependent lifestyles.

The Centre for Cities has a really nice study called ‘Mapping the 30-minute city’ and what it finds in general is that the primary reasons that public transport is so poor in the UK’s cities (outside of London) is not due to an under-investment in trams or metros but rather due to extremely low density levels near transit stops.

To state the obvious, people use public transport more when they live near stations and bus stops. In Lille, someone living within 800m of a public transport stop is four times more likely to commute via public transport than someone who doesn’t.

One big reason why density levels are low near train, tram, tube and bus stops is the planning system. Take Bishopsgate Goodsyard in London’s Shoreditch, a site as close to public transport as humanly possible, it took seven years to get planning permission and saw the total number of houses proposed cut from 1,500 to less than 500. Or this recently refused project in Brighton, 500 homes on the site of a disused gasworks – about as brownfield as it gets – next to the city’s busiest bus route.

Housing near train and tube stations tends to be more valuable. In fact, London properties within 500M walk of a Crossrail station go for 10.6% more on average. The same is true to varying extents in Manchester, Nottingham and Edinburgh. Yet while the invisible hand of the market is directing us to build near fast and frequent public transport connections to strong labour markets, the planning system stands in the way.

London is Britain’s best-connected city. More people use public transport and fewer people drive there than anywhere else in the UK. Yet as Sam Bowman recently pointed out, since 2016 London has underbuilt relative to the rest of the UK: “London’s is 15.7% of England’s population, but only 10.8% of house building starts and 12.6% of completions.”

Removing planning restrictions to allow more people to live near train, tram, tube, and bus stops is one of the best things we can do to make it easier for people to live low-carbon lifestyles. One model to look at is New Zealand’s move to automatically allow six-storey buildings on the land around rapid transit stops. 

Another model to consider is estate renewal. London, in particular, has hundreds of large low-density council housing estates built after the Second World War. Demolishing and rebuilding these estates at higher densities would not only unlock more housing in areas well-served by transport, it would also allow us to fund a major decarbonisation of the social housing stock. As it stands, many council estates have major problems with cold and damp. Some have no insulation whatsoever.

UC Berkeley’s CoolClimate network has a tool which models the impact of various local climate policies from energy efficiency and diet change to electrifying heat and solar panels. CoolClimate’s tool shows that for almost every major city in California, the most impactful emissions reduction policy is to allow more housing to be built in urban areas near fast transport connections.

This is, by the way, a major blindspot in the work of the Climate Change Committee. While their most recent progress report does rightly mention fixing planning, in particular, in terms of ending the onshore wind ban and expanding permitted development rights for heat pumps, it is silent on the green benefits of allowing more housing near transport links.

In fact, the only reference to allowing more housing near public transport that I can find from the Climate Change Committee is a report from 2019, which calls for the National Planning Policy Framework to be updated with clearer guidance on recommended densities near transport. I’d go much further, but it’s at least directionally correct. The issue is that I can’t find a reference to it in any of their later works. This is despite allowing more development near transport being one of the most cost-effective emission reduction policies that there is.

There’s another reason that building more is the greener option. Old homes tend to be cold homes. Britain’s housing stock is the oldest in the world, which poses massive energy efficiency challenges. New homes built to high standards emit much less over their life.

Everything that’s true of housing applies to energy too.

The past decade or so has seen enormous progress in decarbonising our power system. Britain has taken coal off-the-grid and renewables make up an increasingly large share of our energy mix. Yet, we haven’t reached net zero power yet and we will need to bring even more clean power online to move from gas to electric heating. 

And we don’t just need to build more wind turbines (offshore and onshore), solar farms, and nuclear power stations, we need to build the grid infrastructure to get that power to where people actually live.

One big difference between a grid that’s powered by fossil fuels and one that’s powered mostly by renewables is that the latter needs substantially more pylons and substations. Britain already has the infrastructure for an energy system where most of our power is generated by a small number of fossil fuel power stations. Moving to one where power is generated in a much more decentralised way with everything from solar on roofs to large offshore wind farms will require us to approve many more projects like the one Green Party co-leader Adrian Ramsay MP is objecting to.