I am teaching Ed Glaeser's Triumph of the City to my undergrads right now; he has a chapter called "Is there anything greener than blacktop." Just for fun, I plotted urban land share by state (source Demographia) against CO2 emissions per capita by state. Here is what you get:
The regression line is log-linear. An R2 of .28 on a bivariate relationship is not awful. One should never make claims based on such things, but they are kind of fun to look at.
The regression line is log-linear. An R2 of .28 on a bivariate relationship is not awful. One should never make claims based on such things, but they are kind of fun to look at.
