Greenwashing Auto-Dependency with EVs

Deep Dive – Climate Change Series

This is the seventh article in a series that looks at the gap between climate rhetoric and reality in terms of what municipal governments say they are doing versus what they are actually accomplishing. The series compares and contrasts policies and outcomes in Halifax, Nova Scotia, with its nearest comparable American neighbor, Portland, Maine.

If you’re wondering why care at all about these two cities, you may like to read a brief overview of the series.

Previously, Part 6 looked at the research that shows us how high-rise densities can be accommodated with considerably fewer stories using courtyard-type buildings. Here in Part 7, we contrast the false promise of electric vehicles in Halifax with land use reform to reduce auto-dependency in Portland. Part 8 (final article in the series), looks to the future in both municipalities and consider whether recent changes in Portland have pointed the city in the direction of Halifax, with a shared emphasis on “nodes”, “corridors”, “height”, and “density.”

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The Climate Rationale for Land Use Reform to Produce Human-Scale Development

This series aims to show how municipalities are at the center of the climate crisis and clarify what can be done to reduce emissions and to improve quality of life. Well over half of emissions tie back to decisions made by municipalities in terms of what and where things get built. Many municipalities today have climate action plans. Yet, for cultural reasons, most are ineffective. They simply don’t produce meaningful change. A credible plan would focus on three key measurable objectives. I’ve talked about two of these in past articles focusing on building demolition, high-rise construction, and courtyard-type buildings (i.e., the viable alternative to high-rises). In this article, we’ll look at the third objective, namely ending the practice of expanding auto-dependent development and embracing the human scale.

To begin, let’s revisit a chart referenced elsewhere in this series. You’ll notice there’s a sharp rise in emissions for both Canada and the U.S. in the 1950s, the dawn of the age of mass suburbia. A lot more people driving. A lot more emissions.

You can also see above that Canada tracks with the United States in producing more CO₂ per capita than most other countries on the planet.¹ There’s a good reason for this. Canadians lead an auto-dependent lifestyle conceived of and defined in the U.S.A.

An American first came up with the idea of single-use zoning in 1915. It was a group of Americans who created a template for car-oriented suburbs in the late 1920s. During the Great Depression, the U.S. government made rules that required this kind of development. And in the 1980s, Americans on Wall Street defined standard real estate product types to more efficiently finance and propagate urban sprawl. Canadians have embraced all these American ideas, and they have the CO2 emissions to show for it.

Look at the two images below. On the left, you see the cover page for a key Depression-era publication titled Subdivision Standards. This is the document that contains the rules (i.e., federal regulations) mentioned above. For our purposes, we need to understand just two things about this publication. First, it was the downstream product of a piece of legislation called the National Housing Act, enacted into law in 1934. And second, this publication was instrumental in effectively mandating suburban development across the country for decades.

The National Housing Act struck a chord with the Canadian government. In 1935, just one year later, Canada passed a similar law called the Dominion Housing Act. On the right, there’s a poster advertising this new law. It shows a Cape Cod-style house, which is emblematic of the Canadian embrace of an American lifestyle.²

Cross the border from the U.S. into Canada today, and you see the same strip malls, hotel chains, and big box stores as you’d see in any state. Any credible climate action plan in Canada or the United States would include a key objective to stop expanding auto-dependent development and instead build at the human scale. As the dozen articles below illustrate, the link between auto-dependency and global heating is hardly controversial.

1. We can’t beat the climate crisis without rethinking land use (Brookings Institution)
2. Rethinking Urban Sprawl (Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development)
3. Suburbs are a climate disaster, but they can be redeemed (Nature)
4. How can we reduce the climate footprint of the suburbs? (MIT)
5. Latest IPCC Report Highlights How ‘Smarter’ Cities Can Mitigate Climate Change (Yale University)
6. Discourage urban sprawl (David Suzuki Foundation)
7. Addressing Transportation and Inflation is a Climate Solution (America Walks)
8. Climate change focus moves to the suburbs as cities continue to sprawl (Canadian Broadcasting Corp)
9. Why Sprawl Could Be the Next Big Climate Change Battle (National Public Radio)
10. Can The Suburbs Help Fight Against Climate Change? (The Sprawl)
11. This map shows how low-density sprawl makes climate change worse (“Greater” Greater Washington)
12. Suburban sprawl cancels carbon-footprint savings of dense urban cores (Berkeley News)

You can accurately predict whether or not a muncipality will stop expanding urban sprawl based on the answer to a single question. Can its local government realize the four specific achievements needed to produce quality, affordable, human-scale development? I’ve described these achievements in a separate article. What’s relevant here is whether or not a municipality’s climate action plan specifies ending the expansion of auto-dependency as a key objective.

I describe the climate action plans for Portland and Halifax in Part 3 of this series. What I’d like to do now is build on that article by looking at what Portland and Halifax have done on the auto-dependency front since publishing their respective climate action plans.

With Portland, we’re talking about recently enacted, comprehensive land use reform. These new regulations hold promise, but there may also be unintended consequences on the horizon. 

In Halifax, we’re talking about the abrogation of responsibility by municipal planners, officials, and politicians to even frame a meaningful discussion regarding urban sprawl and climate change. Halifax is rapidly extending the range of auto-dependency, claiming their green future will be achieved with EVs.

Putting Portland and Halifax Into Context

To better understand what’s happening in Portland and Halifax, context is in order. Before 1996, the two municipalities bore an uncanny resemblance to one another. Both were historic maritime cities. Both had an urbanized peninsula and a less intensively urbanized piece of the mainland.

Below is a map of Portland. The boundaries today are what they’ve been since 1899, after it annexed the land you see to the left of the highway on the map (in orange). The peninsula occupies just under 4 square miles, with the mainland portion and a few islands accounting for the rest of the municipality’s 20 square-mile landmass. Today, about 69,000 people live in Portland (in 2020), and one-third of them live on the peninsula (i.e., 22,982 in 2020).

The map of Halifax below comes from a 1968 travel guide. On it, you see Halifax and a neighboring city called Dartmouth (across the water). At the time, the city of Halifax comprised the peninsula and the bit of mainland (i.e., everything bounded by the yellow highlighting).

Halifax ceased to be its own city in 1996 for reasons I’ll explain shortly. Until that point, municipal boundaries looked much like what you see above, except additional suburban development had spread further onto the mainland. In 1996, Halifax covered 31 square miles, making it a third bigger than Portland, with a larger population of 110,000 people. The population on the Halifax peninsula has hovered around 70,000 for years, which is equivalent to the whole of Portland.

In 1996, the provincial government forced Halifax to amalgamate with two nearby towns and the surrounding rural area. This “regional municipality covers 2,809 square miles, which is more than twice the size of Rhode Island. On the map below, you can see where the former city of Halifax fits into the present-day municipality. Initially, they called it the Halifax Regional Municipality (HRM). Today, it’s simply called Halifax.

In 1999, the new regional municipality asked residents what they thought about amalgamation. Sixty-six percent said they didn’t support it.³ Today, the impact of unaccountable regional bureaucracy and diminished local political representation is clear in light of the quality of planning and development decisions.

The situation in Portland is quite different, which is not to suggest it’s some nirvana. But as described in Part 2, outcomes have been far better in terms of political representation, public participation, governance, and quality of development.

With this said, let’s have a look at the evidence and compare and contrast what’s happening in Halifax and Portland in light of their climate action plans.

Halifax in Execution: Mandating Auto-Dependency Over 2800-Square Miles

As mentioned, in Part 3, I describe the climate action plans for the two municipalities and assess their impact. The plan for Halifax (i.e., HalifACT) ignores the widespread concerns expressed in the articles listed above. The assumption on the part of Halifax’s policymakers is that vehicles powered by oil will disappear in the relative near term, and everyone will drive EVs powered by clean energy.⁴ That’s not going to happen.

Much of this series has focused on the climate impact of destroying Halifax’s historic urban fabric and replacing it with mid- and high-rise buildings. The political message delivered to the public for 20 years has been that so-called “intensification” is desperately needed. According to the municipal bureaucrat at the center of Halifax’s circa 2008 policy, it’s all about “getting people out of their cars.”

Almost two decades on, however, the roads in metro Halifax are congested in a way that they were not before the onset of what influential Nova Scotians call “strategic growth.” This translates to government-engineered population growth, which, in turn, is used to drive both urban intensification and suburban sprawl.

Recall that real estate and construction is the largest combined sector of Nova Scotia’s economy. When visiting Halifax, it’s impossible blithely ignore the construction cranes you see in every direction. Without rapid population growth, prominent developers would quickly start losing money. And that’s not an acceptable outcome to those pulling the strings.

Within Canada, seriously flawed, climate-damaging planning and development practices are not unique to Halifax. Real-time traffic data maintained by Dutch multinational TomTom confirms that Canadian municipalities have disproportionately higher levels of congestion relative to their American counterparts. As shown below, in 2024, six of the top ten spots were Canadian.⁵   

When my wife and I returned to Halifax in 2007 to raise our children, there were few traffic issues. You can see above that in 2024, Halifax had the fifth-worst traffic in North America in terms of Average Travel Time. It also had the largest increase in travel time since 2023. All of this is driven by top-down governance of the sort described in Part 2 of this series that compelled us to leave Halifax in 2025. 

So what of the auto-dependent development that’s responsible for much of the congestion? It’s largely ignored by government officials and politicians proclaiming to care so much about wanting to reduce CO₂ emissions.

Outside the urban core, the regional municipality is split into 19 different “plan areas” for the purpose of planning and development. Each area has a mix of suburban and rural development, and each has its own land-use plan (a.k.a., master plan) and zoning regulations governing development.⁶ Collectively, these regulations mandate auto-dependency in 2,800 out of 2,809 square miles that make up Halifax.⁷

These plans and their associated regulations are overly bureaucratic and obtusely written. Like the Halifax Centre Plan described in Part 2, they’re an expression of government intent with no meaningful public input of the sort that shaped Portland’s master plan.

More than five years after Halifax council passed its climate action plan, only 4 of the 19 plans even acknowledge climate change’s existence. In each case, Halifax planners copied and pasted a small amount of identical text regarding climate change’s impact on a specific floodplain.⁸ None of the 19 plans speaks to the linkage between auto-dependency and rising climate emissions.

Nothing is said about the relevance of establishing practices that consistently produce human-scale development. Their plans and associated regulations operate in a world in which climate change does not exist. It’s a crude form of land development that exacts a heavy toll beyond climate emissions.

Let’s look at what’s going on in two of these plan areas to illustrate the gap between the performative material Halifax produces and their auto-centric development practices.

The first series of photos you’ll see below was taken in the Halifax Mainland plan area. It encompasses land that the former city of Halifax annexed back in the 1950s. The regulations governing the development you’ll see are found in the Halifax Mainland Land Use By-law.

What you’ll see is recent development activity at the edge of an business park called Bayer’s Lake. It contains retail and other commercial uses that would fit naturally into a walkable, mixed-use urban environment.⁹

As shown above, what had been an Acadian forest habitat a few years back now resembles a moonscape of shattered rock. On it, Nova Scotia builders will erect what amounts to being throw-away buildings using a “tilt-up construction.”

Self-described “strategic plans” for business and industrial parks (prepared in 2008 and 2020) do not address global warming. Instead, you find content such as this:

Based on discussions with local developers, in suburban locations, each new square foot of office space requires a total of four square feet of land to support it. This means that the floor area ratio (FAR) of the building is just 25% of the total building site, with the remaining 75% used for surface parking, circulation and landscaping. To illustrate, a new 50,000 SF office building would require a 200,000 SF site.

HRM Business Parks Functional Plan (2008)

The next sequence of photos was taken in a part of Halifax called Bedford, which sits in the Bedford Plan Area. There’s nothing unique regarding development in either this plan area or the Halifax Mainland Plan Area (above). The examples I’m showing here are typical of how land is developed throughout the region.

Like the Halifax (Mainland) Plan Area, both the master plan and zoning ordinance shaping Bedford are outdated expressions of top-down government intent, rife with bureaucratic mediocrity. Bad policy and regulations produce bad human habitat that fails to deliver on quality of life.    

Most everything you’ve seen here was built after 2014, the year that provincial politicians (in all parties) bought into the idea that mass immigration was key to achieving what Nova Scotian policymakers routinely refer to as strategic growth.

Long after Halifax began “showing the world how to tackle climate change,” few, if any, at either the provincial or municipal level express doubts or concerns regarding the path taken. The graph below comes from a government paper associated with Halifax’s regional plan (our next and final subject specific to Halifax).  I’d like to draw your attention to two projections. The first is the one labeled “2014 Regional Plan.” It represents the projected population just before the province’s widespread embrace of mass immigration. The second is the one labeled “NS Targeted Migration.” This projection reflects an aggressive, rapid population increase year after year. This is what is actually taking place today.

Again, context is helpful. What I’ve described here is happening in a country where the “insatiable demand for cheap labor” began to take root in the early 2000s. Concerns regarding the federal government’s opening the door for the mass influx of cheap labor go back more than a decade. In other words, this issue has been understood for some time, and it’s only worsened in recent years.¹⁰

At the municipal level, Halifax’s planners operate as obedient foot soldiers directed to help implement a mandate from the Nova Scotia premier (equivalent to a governor) to double the province’s population by 2060.  Below is a selection from a municipal planning document that parrots back the mandate in the absence of relevant analysis.

Then there’s the climate angle to all this. Doubling Nova Scotia’s population will be done largely through international immigration. The majority of new arrivals are, as the OECD has noted, “low-skilled” immigrants from the global south. Most come from India.¹¹

Per the graph below, as Nova Scotia’s government fulfills its ministerial mandate to double the population, it is increasing the carbon footprints of many new arrivals by sevenfold.¹² Halifax’s climate action plan has nothing to say about another million people (including many unskilled workers) adopting CO₂-intensive Canadian lifestyles shaped by auto-centric urban development.

Per the graph below that the most common type of housing built today is apartments in mid- and high-rise buildings. The municipality is in the process of housing a growing renter class who work in Nova Scotia’s low-paid service sector. These new arrivals will live in increasingly congested auto-dependent environments of the sort shown above.

Looking ahead, Halifax is certain to produce more of the same. In June 2025, Halifax council adopted an updated version of its 2014 regional plan. This plan “establishes long-range, region-wide planning policies outlining where, when, and how future growth and development should take place.”

There’s a lot one could say about this overarching master plan, but it’s not necessary for our purposes. Suffice to say, it’s consistent with everything Halifax has produced for years. It calls for “strategic growth,” which implies a mixture of low- and high-density auto-dependent development and mass immigration to persistently increase the demand for housing.

And as ocean circulation nears a tipping point, Halifax’s urban planners routinely work with politicians and developers to expand auto dependency’s reach across the region. Below are photos of 25 recently completed homes produced under Halifax’s land use laws in various plan areas. Looking at the walk scores, you’ll see that each house scores abysmally low. A larger sample of 50 recently constructed houses in the Halifax Regional Municipality produced an average walk score of 8.5 (out of a possible score of 100). Halifax’s climate action plan has nothing to say about this. Nor does the regional plan.

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Portland in Execution: Land Use Reform Aimed at Decreasing Auto-Dependency

Forcibly amalgamating Halifax with the surrounding region in 1996 made it part of a regional municipality that is 140 times larger than Portland (i.e., 2809 versus 20 sq.-mi). Given the vast tracts of land that can (and will) be given over to the automobile in the years ahead in the absence of change, one might think there’d be a sense of urgency as the climate warms. But as we’ve seen, this is not the case.

Yet, as I’ve written separately, reform that produces well-designed, human-scale development isn’t an abstract concept. It’s happened in Gaithersburg and elsewhere.  

As shown below, compared to Halifax, most of Portland is already built out. Maintaining the status quo is less consequential from an emissions perspective relative to Halifax. Portland could have just stuck with existing auto-development patterns and called it a day. But they didn’t. Instead, Portland embarked on a six-year effort to completely rewrite their land use code, focusing in part on auto-dependency. They refer to this multi-phase project simply as ReCode.

Much can be said about ReCode. It’s a book-length subject that Portland has already documented clearly in terms of process, work products, and public feedback. For this article, I only wish to make a few key observations and share examples of development that contrast with what’s happening in Halifax.

Nine key points:

1. ReCode’s purpose was to create a new land use code that advances Portland’s vision for the future as laid out in their master plan (i.e., Portland 2030). The core of this vision is “authentic” development of the sort that reinforces Portland’s identity, provides greater housing choice, and meaningfully reduces emissions.
2. Significant effort went into ReCode. Portland produced a land use code that the public (and small-scale developers, for that matter) could readily understand. Similar to Portland’s master plan, it’s well organized and clearly written.
3. Portland executed ReCode in phases, with hundreds of people providing thousands of individual pieces of public feedback over the course of six years. They leveraged a variety of technology platforms to solicit and collect feedback.
4. At each stage in their process, Portland invested significant time in reviewing, organizing, and responding to this feedback. As of this writing, all this communication remains publicly available via the ReCode portal.
5. Two separate camps emerged. In one, you find developers, real estate brokers, free-market proponents, and self-described “urbanists” advocating for more density and height. In the other, you find residents supportive of development yet deeply concerned about what’s being proposed. This second camp was essentially requesting that the city abide by the community vision laid out in Portland’s master plan.
6. By the end of the six years, Portland had in place a land use code that may accomplish some of what the municipality set out to achieve regarding auto-dependency. But there are some legitimate concerns. More on this shortly.
7. ReCode emphasized introducing  new housing types and uses into established residential areas in ways that are “sensitive to neighborhood context.” The intent is for new construction to be compatible with existing development and to provide residents with more opportunities to walk to local shops and services. 
8. ReCode opened up newly designated commercial/transit “corridors” and “nodes” to more intense residential development. The expectation is that increasing residential densities in these areas makes transit more viable. The underlying premise raised concerns among many residents.
9. ReCode drastically increased permissible building heights in and around their downtown, which raises questions about whether they’ll deviate from the path they have been on,  guided by both their master plan and climate action plan.

Portland’s city council enacted their new land use code in November 2024. It’s too soon to make definitive statements regarding the overall character of development that Portland will pursue under the code. What can be said is that over the past decade both Portland and neighboring South Portland have produced plenty of quality human-scale development. There are also relevant examples of development in Portsmouth, NH, which sits 50 miles south of Portland. Taken together, these examples provide some idea of what the future could hold, mindful that there are concerns on the horizon.

Looking at the images below, you’ll see a difference in both the scale and quality of development relative to Halifax. I’ve included some historic development to emphasize that these municipalities frequently pursue development that emphasizes authenticity of place in a way that is not done in Halifax.

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As shown below, the situation is similar in nearby Portsmouth, NH.

These projects in Portland are built at the human scale for good reason. For over 30 years, development in the municipality has been shaped by the city’s Design Manual, which contains both standards and guidelines emphasizing human-scale development.   

The original version of the manual specified urban design guidelines for the downtown. As shown below, the purpose section of these guidelines speaks to the expectation that developers will pursue human-scale development for a range of aesthetic, cultural, and economic reasons. These guidelines have remained unaltered since Portland’s city council adopted them in 1991 because the underlying concepts are timeless.

Illustrations and discussions in Portland’s design standards reinforce the understanding that human-scale implies buildings having two to six stories, as this range maximizes pedestrian comfort, and promotes walkability.  

What all the evidence presented above suggests is that Portland’s municipal politicians, planners, and the development community have generally embraced good design in its downtown. The question becomes, with the adoption of their new zoning ordinance, will this triad build on these successes and expand the range of human-scale development known to reduce emissions?

With this in mind, I’d like to close out this seven-part series by looking to the future and clarifying what lies ahead in Portland and Halifax.

Previously, Part 6 looked at the research that shows us how high-rise densities can be accommodated with considerably fewer stories using courtyard-type buildings. Next: In Part 8 (final article in the series), we look to the future in both municipalities and consider whether recent changes in Portland have pointed the city in the direction of Halifax, with a shared emphasis on “nodes”, “corridors”, “height”, and “density.”

1. Middle eastern oil producers Qatar, Barain, UAE, Oman, and Saudi Arabia all produce more CO2 per captia than the US and Canada. ↩︎
2. National figures for private vehicle emissions for Canada are reportedly lower in Canada based on pre-pandemic figures (i.e., 15% versus 22% for the U.S.). But this figure understates the true impact. Canada’s tar sands, for example, significantly inflate the national emissions total, thereby reducing the proportional share of transportation. Emissions related to Canada’s larger percentage of high-rises relative to the US do the same.  Per figures maintained by the Council on Tall Buildings and Urban Habitat, Canada has 1.8 times more 150m+ buildings and  1.7 times more 200m+ buildings than the US. (Calculations assumes a U.S. population that is 9 times larger than Canada.) ↩︎
3. This 1999 Halifax Regional Muncipality (HRM) Citizen Survey is discussed at length in a 2000 paper in the Canadian Journal of Regional Science titled, Amalgamation Perspectives: Citizen Response to Municipal Consolidation. ↩︎
4. This magical thinking is in line with other widely accepted policies such as doubling the population as quickly as possible to improve the province’s economic prospects. ↩︎
5. Keep in mind that Canada has just one-ninth the population of the U.S., yet Canadian cities dominate the list of North American metro areas with the worst traffic congestion. ↩︎
6. In Nova Scotia, a master plan is referred to as “municipal planning strategy.” They differ significantly in tone and content from many American master plans, but they serve the same purpose. ↩︎
7. As I’ve described in Part 4, in the remaining nine square miles, climate-damaging high-rise development is now the norm. ↩︎
8. Four plan areas have Municipal Planning Strategies (i.e., the Canadian equivalent of master plan) that make a single reference to climate change in the context to flooding in the Sackville River floodplain. The plan areas are Bedford, Sackville, Sackville Drive, and Beaver Bank/Hammonds Plains/Upper Sackville. ↩︎
9. If you’re interested in the mindset behind these regulations, you can read through the Halifax municipality’s “Business Park” study, originally completed in 2009, and updated in 2020. These plans are influenced by decades-old American ideas around using Euclidean zoning to strictly separate uses and entrench auto-dependency in daily life. ↩︎
10. The CBC’s Andrew Chang does a good job explaining how, during and after Covid, Canada increased its use of temporary foreign workers under pressure from businesses claiming (falsely) that there were no Canadian workers to be had. ↩︎
11. The implications of these political decisions go beyond climate change. To cite just one, as the new arrivals keep on coming, young Canadians face insurmountable barriers to entering the job market. ↩︎
12. At the time the mandate was issued, Nova Scotia’s Minister of Labour, Skills and Immigration was an individual named Jill Balser. Going into this leadership role, Basler’s professional experience included work as a receptionist for a power company, and a few years with a small non-profit focused on “community cohesiveness” and “trusting relationships.” ↩︎