Scaling Properties of Carbon Emissions in US Cities: Bigger is Better

The Vulcan Project version 4.0 emissions data product has generated all fossil fuel CO2 emissions across the US landscape, every hour, from 2010-2022 down to the scale of neighborhoods. From this complex landscape, we have extracted FFCO2 emissions for every urban area, following multiple commonly used urban definitions. The information extracted includes both Scope 1 and Scope 2 emissions with a wide array of “functional” attributes such as sector, fuel, vehicle class, building class, road class, and industrial sub-sector. Here, we analyze ~4000 US cities in terms of their size scaling properties. In particular, urban scaling properties provide novel insight into emergent properties such as the relationship between urban metabolism and urban size properties. This relationship varies by region and is indicative of the relationship between urban form and economies of scale including implications for infrastructural development and urban sprawl.