Now consider the new location (just above), a low-rise "landscraper" of a building fronted by large parking lots outside of a suburb called Lenexa, Kansas, and across the road from, among other things, a wheat field.

Let's look at some analytical maps and data:

I ran the addresses for the current and new facilities through Walk Score, a site that calculates walkability, and Abogo, the calculator developed by the Center for Neighborhood Technology that estimates carbon emissions (and household costs) from transportation by location. Above, EPA's current headquarters location gets a Walk Score of 62, better than 81 percent of Kansas City as a whole (see top map of the two just above). You can see the locations of nearby amenities on the Walk Score map, which also identifies six bus transit lines within a quarter-mile walk of the facility.

Abogo (the second map, just above) calculates that an average resident in the vicinity of the current EPA Region 7 headquarters emits 0.39 metric tons of carbon dioxide per month, slightly more than half the regional average of 0.74 tons per month. Symbolically, it's a great location for an agency that is attempting to address global warming. All that yellow and green on the map indicates that the average transportation costs associated with residences in the area are below the regional average.

(Abogo doesn't directly calculate emissions and costs associated with commercial and civic facilities, but one can extrapolate that the differences between good- and poor-performing locations would be even greater because of the number of visitors associated with commercial and civic locations.)

Now let's compare the same calculations and maps for the sprawl site to which EPA intends to move. The Walk Score is only a "car-dependent" 28. That is not only far below that of the downtown location and the average for Kansas City sites; it is also far below the average even for the fringe suburb of Lenexa, 86 percent of whose residents are said to have a higher score. You could see all the nearby amenities on the Walk Score map if there were any. Sheesh.

But, wait, it gets worse. See all that orange and red on the Abogo map? Abogo calculates that the transportation carbon emissions associated with the new location are a whopping 1.08 metric tons per person per month. That's nearly three times the average associated with the current location and one and a half times the regional average. This is not just some random corporation making a crappy location decision: This is the agency charged with protecting the environment for the United States of America.

(Ironically, EPA's new regional headquarters did, in fact, recently belong to a corporation. The agency apparently decided that, if the site was once good enough for Applebee's corporate honchos, it's good enough for us.)