City Dwellers Are Greener Than Countryfolk (But Don’t Pat Yourself on the Back Just Yet)
- Posted by: Siobhan O'Connor
- on March 23, 2009 at 5:48 pm
Before we get to the goodish news, a caveat: Let’s not for any reason allow this kind of thing to make us feel like we can run the A/C all summer and crank the heat with the windows open. Now onto the results. A new study by the International Institute for Environment and Development in London shows that “greenhouse gas emissions for New Yorkers are less than a third of those of the national average for the USA. Those of Barcelona residents are half the average for Spain.” In fact, all 11 cities surveyed fared better than their rural counterparts.
Not too shabby, but let’s think about this. If we’re talking per person emissions, this makes perfect sense, especially if you’ve ever been inside a New York City apartment. Also, city dwellers drive less, and tend to be home less, also curbing energy use.
Says the IIED’s David Dodman: “Many cities have surprisingly low per capita emissions but what is clear is that most emissions come from the world’s wealthier nations. The real climate-change culprits are not the cities themselves but the high consumption lifestyles of people living across these wealthy countries.”
He also added that most people living in cities still produce more than their per capita emissions allowance, with the exception of Sao Paulo and Rio.
It’s not the first study of its kind (Brookings did one last year—the link seems to be dead though), and I wonder what the takeaway is from this kind of report. Because like we said, we needn’t be patting ourselves on the back quite yet.
DISCUSSION: 2 Comments
It’s not about patting ourselves on the back! The takeaway is that sprawl is quantifiably unsustainable. It has often been argued that cities are the antithesis of environmental concern, spurring many environmentalists to move far from them. What we need to realize is that we are being most friendly to nature by leaving it to itself and choosing to live in compact, walkable cities. A true environmentalist wouldn’t unequivocally oppose growth. Instead, they would fight for the right kind of growth. And that’s a pretty big takeaway: a postive incarnation of environmentalism, advancing a vision of livable and sustainable cities rather than resisting the kind of development that has been the norm for years.
The idea that we are separate from nature troubles me. So, how can we leave nature to itself since we are part of nature. Everything we do and everything we build is part of nature. The thing we need to realize that we humans are the only species on earth that fowls its own nest via resource use and pollution. The solution to our sustainability problem is to stop this fowling process. That’s an almost impossible task for us.