Truckee among the top polluting mountain towns
By Teton Gravity Research
When we set out on our quest to find the mountain towns with the largest carbon footprint, it was not an easy task. The hardest factor was to find a common denominator for all of these different areas. That’s when we discovered an interactive map of the United States created by researchers at UC Berkeley, who weighed over 37 variables, including household energy use, consumer expenditures, and transportation to provide the average metric tons of carbon pollution produced by each household in every county in the United States.
We used this data to rank over 30 mountain towns and, as a jumping-off point, to discover what is going on in these mountain communities.
What we discovered is that the two factors that lead to pollution in most mountain towns are housing and transportation. This usually stems from an inadequate public transit system or large vacation homes that are not occupied for the entire year.
Truckee came in at No. 9.