seeing green

Houston steps to top of list of U.S. cities with lowest carbon footprints

Houston claimed the No. 1 spot among the 50 most visited in the U.S. with the lowest carbon footprint. Sean Pavone/Getty Images

People looking to travel to a sustainable city probably don’t have Texas spots at the top of their lists. Images of oil, cars, and blasting air conditioners spring up. The Texas power grid, no one need remind us, is barely hanging on.

But Texas blew other states away for lowest carbon footprint per capita, landing Houston at the top of the 2022 list compiled by travel blog Park Sleep Fly. Austin followed (No. 3), then San Antonio (No. 4) and Dallas (No. 9). Only Florida appeared twice in the top 10, and none matched Texas with four cities.

Among the 50 most visited in the U.S., those with the lowest carbon footprint are:

1. Houston
2. Los Angeles
3. Austin
4. San Antonio
5. Tampa, Florida
6. Salt Lake City
7. Phoenix
8. Miami
9. Dallas
10. Portland, Oregon

Houston is not exactly a green place, with less-than-ideal utilization of public transportation. It and Dallas tied for third place among least sustainable cities in the same report.

“Public transit isn’t the most popular mode of transportation in Houston, but it does exist,” an online publication called TripSavvy drably admits. The city takes credit for employing “nearly one third” of the nation’s oil and gas extraction workers.

On the renewable side, however, Houston claims more than 100 solar energy companies, and at least half of its corporate research and development centers pursue “energy technology and innovation.” And its huge population spreads the load, leaving only 14.6 metric tons of carbon dioxide per resident — the same as Los Angeles. Big cities seem to have an advantage in this rating system.

Austin is just behind Houston at 15 metric tons per capita, neck-and-neck with San Antonio at 15.2. These two cities have smaller populations to distribute their total footprint, but are generally seen as eco-friendly. Austin got a big head start in 1991 with the introduction of the Austin Energy Green Building program — the first of its kind in the whole country — which created an evaluation system for individual building sustainability that’s still in use. Dallas' carbon footprint is the largest of the Texas cities in the ranking, at 16.5 metric tons per capita.

As such a multifaceted issue (especially tied up in economic concerns), sustainability is hard to pin down from city to city. The multiplicity of this list is yet another indicator that Texas as a whole is a much more nuanced place than many people think.

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This article originally ran on CultureMap.

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A View From HETI

Researchers from Rice University say their recent findings could revolutionize power grids, making energy transmission more efficient. Image via Getty Images.

A new study from researchers at Rice University, published in Nature Communications, could lead to future advances in superconductors with the potential to transform energy use.

The study revealed that electrons in strange metals, which exhibit unusual resistance to electricity and behave strangely at low temperatures, become more entangled at a specific tipping point, shedding new light on these materials.

A team led by Rice’s Qimiao Si, the Harry C. and Olga K. Wiess Professor of Physics and Astronomy, used quantum Fisher information (QFI), a concept from quantum metrology, to measure how electron interactions evolve under extreme conditions. The research team also included Rice’s Yuan Fang, Yiming Wang, Mounica Mahankali and Lei Chen along with Haoyu Hu of the Donostia International Physics Center and Silke Paschen of the Vienna University of Technology. Their work showed that the quantum phenomenon of electron entanglement peaks at a quantum critical point, which is the transition between two states of matter.

“Our findings reveal that strange metals exhibit a unique entanglement pattern, which offers a new lens to understand their exotic behavior,” Si said in a news release. “By leveraging quantum information theory, we are uncovering deep quantum correlations that were previously inaccessible.”

The researchers examined a theoretical framework known as the Kondo lattice, which explains how magnetic moments interact with surrounding electrons. At a critical transition point, these interactions intensify to the extent that the quasiparticles—key to understanding electrical behavior—disappear. Using QFI, the team traced this loss of quasiparticles to the growing entanglement of electron spins, which peaks precisely at the quantum critical point.

In terms of future use, the materials share a close connection with high-temperature superconductors, which have the potential to transmit electricity without energy loss, according to the researchers. By unblocking their properties, researchers believe this could revolutionize power grids and make energy transmission more efficient.

The team also found that quantum information tools can be applied to other “exotic materials” and quantum technologies.

“By integrating quantum information science with condensed matter physics, we are pivoting in a new direction in materials research,” Si said in the release.

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