Did you learn yer reedin, riten, and rithmatic? The article states these are Metropolitan areas. This in and of itself implies city not country. The point was that city residents have smaller per capita foot prints. The larger foot prints seem to be in areas in which coal is burned for electricity. Don’t take offense because we Yankees think “yall” go possim huntin.

So I think the problem lies in H. JOSEF HEBERT’s erroneous characterization of this being “rural”. A better differentiation which he cites later in the article is “Metropolitan area emissions of carbon dioxide are highest in the eastern U.S., where people rely heavily on coal for electricity, the researchers found. They are lower in the West, where weather is more favorable and where electricity and motor fuel prices have been higher.” However it probably gets more reads to run with a headline of “People in US cities have less of a carbon footprint than rural dwellers” than “West Coast more energy efficient than East Coast” because that isn’t any sort of surprise to our intuitions.

If he was going to start with that headline then he needed an argument that ties in the proximity of these metro areas like Lexington to rural areas and the dependence on personal vehicles in Miss Cellania’s area of the state. Aside from the sprawling vomit that is Hamburg increasing our footprint, how many people feed into Lexington from surrounding rural areas where a car or truck is the only non-pedestrian transportation. How many people from Lexington and Louisville work in Frankfort and commute daily, I can name at least 3 close friends. Gas is already expensive and coal costs won’t be cheap forever (one can even argue that mountain top removal is huge aesthetic and environmental cost already) so we need to be thinking towards what to change to use alternative fuel sources, keep sprawl contained and to encourage the use of Lextran as it is so it can gain enough popularity to warrent a greater investment in public transportation. These are issue that I’m sure plague the remainder of the top 10.

As a side note, Miss Cellania, you should totally organize some sort of flossie event in KY, this is my favorite blog and magazine. I’m about to move back to Lexington after a year in the Twin Cities and I plan on biking everywhere and maybe even selling my car.