Energy Sprawl or Energy Efficiency: Climate Policy Impacts on Natural Habitat - Recent Advances and Issues in Environmental Science - page 16

(the “Reference Scenario”), including the renewable fuel standard of the Energy
Independence and Security Act of 2007, and under three Cap-and-Trade Scenarios: the
“Core Cap-and-Trade Scenario”, where the full Lieberman-Warner Climate Change
Act is implemented; the “Few Options Scenario”, where international offsets are not
allowed and where new nuclear production and coal production with CCS are not pos-
sible; and the “CCS Scenario”, where Congress enacts the Low Carbon Economy Act,
a Cap-and-Trade system more favorable to coal with CCS.
Under each scenario, we fi rst estimate the total new land area in the US needed to
produce energy for each production technique as a function of the amount of energy
needed and the land-use intensity of production. We examine the effect of US climate
policy on future energy sprawl using energy scenarios based on proposed legislation,
building on a body of literature on this topic [1, 2, 13-15]. Note that our analysis fo-
cuses only on US land-use implications, ignoring other, potentially signifi cant interna-
tional land-use implications of US climate policy. Second, we use available informa-
tion on where new energy production facilities would be located to partition this area
among major habitat types (Figure 2). We calculate the new area directly impacted
by energy development within each major habitat type, but do not attempt to predict
where within each major habitat type energy development will take place, nor possible
indirect effects on land-use regionally or globally due to altered land markets. Our
analysis provides a broad overview of what change in the energy sector will mean for
area impacted in different natural habitat types, recognizing that such a broad analysis
will inevitably have to simplify parts of a complex world.
Figure 2. Major habitat types used to analyze the land-use implications of EIA scenarios. Within
each major habitat type, there are a variety of land-uses, from relatively wild places to agricultural
and urban systems. Our analysis estimates the new area needed for energy development within each
major habitat type, without specifying where within each major habitat type this energy development
might occur.