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The World's Most Wasteful Megacity
merbs writes: The world's most wasteful megacity is a densely populated, steadily aging, consumerist utopia where we buy, and throw away, a staggering amount of stuff (abstract). Where some faucet, toilet, or pipe, is constantly leaking in our apartments. Where an armada of commerce-beckoning lights are always on. Where a fleet of gas-guzzling cars still clog the roadways. I, along with my twenty million or so neighbors, help New York City use more energy, suck down more water, and spew out more solid waste than any other mega-metropolitan area.
...in a city that never sleeps.
Yeah, you're #1 for waste, but how do you do on housing prices? A detached average home in Toronto or Vancouver now runs more than $1,000,000 CDN (which is somewhere around $820,000 USD.)
I do not fail; I succeed at finding out what does not work.
Went to town riding on a pony stuck a feather in his hat and called macaRoni
New York is only the most wasteful global megacity because it's full of Americans. The more important point is that New York City is the most environmentally friendly place in the United States, when measured by pollution emitted per capita. (See this list of CO2 emissions by state: New York State, whose population is tightly focused in NYC, has twice the CO2 emissions per capita as the more sprawling development in Florida, and one New Yorker is worth *four* Texans.
To improve its environmental standing, America needs *more* dense urbanized areas like NYC, not less.
New York City is probably more productive than most of the other cities cited in the article based solely on their raw populations.
Wasn't NYC the first modern day megacity designed around roads, power, sewage, and other items? Back then, it didn't really matter, as long as nobody needed to clean out the "night soil" and the lights were kept on.
It is doubtful this will change anytime soon. NYC isn't like San Antonio or Houston, with the ability to expand and bring in new tax revenue to pay for new projects, and any tax hikes for energy efficiency will be as reviled as the large soda water cup ban. Solar? Maybe on new buildings, it can be code to mandate solar panel windows... but that technology is still nascent.
Nuclear? New Yorkers rather live in the blackout of 1977 than have nuclear power anywhere near them.
NYC isn't going anywhere, and it sure as heck isn't going green anytime soon with alternative energy projects, especially with this temporary oil glut going on.
You probably meant 1 texan emission is worth 4 new yorker since roughly for around 20-25 million people texas has 4 time the CO2 emission of new york. "01 Texas 656 12.18% 25,631,778"
"09 New York 158 2.93% 19,501,616"
Gut feeling : maybe a lot of Co2 emission are due to the petro industry, oil extraction and methane burning ? Just guessing it might not be due 100% to commute/shipping only.
C. Sagan : A demon haunted world:
http://www.amazon.com/gp/product/0345409469/
visit randi.org
I tried searching on the PNAS website for the source of the image and I couldn't turn up anything. I am curious how they are measuring the waste, whether it counts industrial, residential, and/or waste from government buildings and in what time period. I just think that there aren't any clear statistics.
Okay, what do you expect? NYC (in one form or another) has been there for FOUR HUNDRED YEARS (the area was first settled in 1624). It's been a massive metropolitan settlement for the better part of the last two hundred.
It's not as if someone went back to 1700 or so and started out with a city planning commission and 2015-level civil engineering technology.
So yes, the city's going to be ANYTHING but efficiently run, plumbed, or laid out.
There are also 8.5 MILLION PEOPLE in the NYC metropolitan area.
As part of the US Northeast Megalopolis, it's the center of a population of 53 million people.
Even if everyone was a card-carrying Greenpeace member, that's STILL a metric fuckton of waste. Urban living simply can't be environmentally neutral.
But, for that matter, living in a cave isn't environmentally neutral either.
Even with the cleanest, most environmentally conscious methods of living close to nature, over time a primitive community's garbage midden will overwhelm it.
But hey, if you want to volunteer to be one of the people forced to shiver in a cave because modern society is so wasteful, be my guest.
A better and more humane course of action would be to adapt over time. Nothing lasts forever, not even NYC. It can, slowly, be rebuilt and repurposed, given a long enough time frame.
Chas - The one, the only.
THANK GOD!!!
I am sure that's an unbiased article
When did /. start running this kind of guilt-peddling bullshit?
-jcr
The only title of honor that a tyrant can grant is "Enemy of the State."
In Manila, there was a trash heap, Smokey Mountain, that was so large that it would regularly catch fire under its own decomposing weight. People made their livelihood there, so that, sadly, one could claim to be 3rd generation Smokey Mountain. It has been shutdown (and grassed over) now, but the new dump-site, Payatas is home to some 80,000 people.
If it acquires resources on instantiation like a duck, then its a shared_ptr<Duck>
Just swap out all of those yellow gas guzzling taxis with toyota praises - energy waste crisis adverted! now pay me my consulting fee...
Actually, New York City has an excellent history of pre-planning. Wikipedia. While it's true it's not the 1700s, remember that the population was significantly lower then. And "New York City" as people know it wasn't even formed until the late 1800s when the four outer boroughs joined Manhattan.
But, yeah, infrastructure technology is hard to plan for.
--Jim (me)
Looking at the initial source , the DoE, here is what they say about how it is consumed :
State Residential Industrial Transportation
new York 30 5 66
texas 10 226 187
Most of the energy consumption is industrial by a factor 22 for for CO2 emission. There is a lot of emission for CO2 on transportation, but it is unclear how much is due to industry exporting stuff outside. The things is, when looking at transportation texas is an outlier (along with California and florida), despite other state having also a sparse population and lot of commute. That's why i think not all is due to commute only.
C. Sagan : A demon haunted world:
http://www.amazon.com/gp/product/0345409469/
visit randi.org
As soon as things are in absolute rather than per capita you know it is BS. Big round numbers mask anything meaningful. If New York has twice the populationof another city, but is compared in absolute terms it is not a useful comparison. I stopped reading once I saw it was a BIG ROUND NUMBERS hatchet job.
The problem is garbage collection runs twice a week in NYC... people are obligated to produce enough waste to keep their cans full.
In all seriousness it isn't fair to compare NYC with Tokyo without compensation for Tokyo being a *much* warmer climate than NYC. I'm not arguing overall point just comparisons need to be apples to apples.
It's hard to take seriously an article claiming New York is the most wasteful megacity when they don't even mention Los Angeles. New York metro is 20 million. Los Angeles metro is 18 million.
NYorkers who control 90% of the USAian media are always saying that it is the stupit southerners who don't have indoor plumbing that are causing all the pollution in the world. Now this story is saying it is the NYorkers. I call bullshit. This story is obviously a plant by racist homophobic Nazi southerners trying to impugn the majesty that is NY city.
Using taxis for everything because the lower classes take the train is a lifestyle choice.
That's still a lot more efficient than what most other Americans do, which is drive 30-60 minutes each way on their daily commute, using their own car. The NYers who do take cabs tend to take them short distances (since everything is closer together there), and they're sharing the same vehicles, instead of all having their own, and then needing giant parking lots for them all.
Yes, it'd be better if everyone just took the subway, but if you compare to any other American metropolis, NYC is very efficient. And yes, NYC is probably more wasteful than a lot of other non-American cities, but that's apples and oranges.
Americans. He was a troll, but in this case, also not wrong.
Any troll worth its salt should be, if not technically correct, not obviously wrong. How can a troll provoke discussion if it can be disregarded as an idiot from the start.
People in Brazil are Americans, people in Hawaii aren't. The lifestyle in NYC is by no means representative of the average Americans lifestyle, even if it might be representative of the US.
NYC also has NIMBYism that prevents solving a lot of the problems. They really have the worst solution to dealing with garbage than just about any other first world city: they ship it somewhere else.
Here's the PNAS article, although it's behind a paywall.
The question that comes to mind is "how many ergs were wasted by people clicking the link to the paper that Brian Merchant, senior editor at Motherboard, put in his article, with a file: URL so that it was COMPLETELY FUCKING USELESS unless either 1) you were logged into his machine or 2) you happened to have downloaded the article and stored it in /Users/brianmerchant/Downloads/pnas201504315_7vpr25%20embargoed.pdf on your UN*X box.
Worthless without looking at it per capita.
so raise their prices. doesn't affect me. Fuck that shit city.
The New York metropolis has 12 million fewer people than Tokyo, yet it uses more energy in total: the equivalent of one oil supertanker every 1.5 days,
We need that oil tanker he mended with his eyes. But that will only last a few days so he better find others, chop chop.
Okay, what do you expect? NYC (in one form or another) has been there for FOUR HUNDRED YEARS (the area was first settled in 1624). It's been a massive metropolitan settlement for the better part of the last two hundred.
It's not as if someone went back to 1700 or so and started out with a city planning commission and 2015-level civil engineering technology. So yes, the city's going to be ANYTHING but efficiently run, plumbed, or laid out.
As opposed to London, Paris, and Tokyo, which were designed and built during the last 50 years, and thus are more efficient.
You're absolutely right. I'd like also to add that well-being, wealth and wastefulness are not that tightly tied to each other (probably there is some correlation, but not really causation). When I was living in Montreal, I got familiar with the North American way of wasting stuff. And I am sure Montreal is not even close to the worst in North America.
Everything was disposable - in a hotel I staid for a while, all the cutlery, plates, cups - disposable. The room even had even disposable cups wrapped in plastic! Also, insulation of the apartments was not that good in many older buildings. There are passive energy houses in Northern Finland - and it's colder here than in Montreal, not even to mention New York. So the cold climate is not that great of an excuse (and cooling requires energy, too - there aren't that many places that do without either or both). One of the most annoying things was the plumbing. There were age-old toilets using huge amounts of water for flushing, leaking taps everywhere and to get anything else than lukewarm water (that is, cold or hot), you had to let the water run for a long time. It didn't of course help that the water was free of charge, in many cases, also the hot water, so there was not really good incentive to fix the plumbing. Also there were no dishwashers in any of the older apartments, which would have been much more energy and water usage efficient - not even to mention more convenient. Some people also said that they care about electricity energy consumption, because in Quebec, it's almost all hydroelectric, so it doesn't increase emissions. Well, at least they tried to think about the environment, but if the consumption was cut down, the hydroelectric power could be exported - bringing in money and reducing emissions somewhere else.
Fixing any of these would actually increase the well-being and reduce waste. It is much nicer to live in an apartment where the floors aren't cold and where you quickly get cold/hot water, for example. And I don't think anybody likes to eat from disposable dishes. Well, at least the washing machines were front-loading, high efficiency types, so not everything was bad.
Okay, what do you expect? NYC (in one form or another) has been there for FOUR HUNDRED YEARS (the area was first settled in 1624).
There was settlement in the area of Paris TEN THOUSAND years ago. And 200 BC (2200 years ago) they were already building forts.
Same with London, two thousand years old (Londinium founded AD 47).
NYC and the areas near NYC are so badly thought out that fixing the city can't be done. One would need to start with a giant wrecking ball and remove everything ever built there and then set a population cap on an entirely new city to be built in its place. If one looks at NYC and considers things like trees per acre then the problems become more obvious. One can spend months in NYC and never touch land. the land is covered with concrete and black top. Zero nature pretty much equals zero quality of life. And worse yet you really can't use that wrecking ball. how many millions of tons of asbestos are in the old buildings in NYC. How many other toxic issues would occur in that rubble? How many caskets and bodies would have to be moved or burned? My impression of NYC is that it appears as if some psychopath dedicated to horror for humanity designed and built the city.
Okay, what do you expect? NYC (in one form or another) has been there for FOUR HUNDRED YEARS (the area was first settled in 1624). It's been a massive metropolitan settlement for the better part of the last two hundred.
It's not as if someone went back to 1700 or so and started out with a city planning commission and 2015-level civil engineering technology.
So yes, the city's going to be ANYTHING but efficiently run, plumbed, or laid out.
As opposed to London, Paris, and Tokyo, which were designed and built during the last 50 years, and thus are more efficient.
Okay, what do you expect? NYC (in one form or another) has been there for FOUR HUNDRED YEARS (the area was first settled in 1624).
There was settlement in the area of Paris TEN THOUSAND years ago. And 200 BC (2200 years ago) they were already building forts.
Same with London, two thousand years old (Londinium founded AD 47).
Sigh. Why do people take an argument and ad absurdum it without trying to understand what is being said and what isn't?
I didn't say there weren't older cities out there. I'm simply explaining part of why NYC is the way it is.
If you look at Paris, London and Tokyo, they're all wasteful as well.
Maybe not AS wasteful as NYC. But that could simply be a function of something else as well. There's no straight-line formula for this.
Chas - The one, the only.
THANK GOD!!!
First article linked says New York City (or metro area) has 20 million people. He kept changing his focus though.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/New_York_metropolitan_area Says about 13.3M
New York City (proper) has never crested 10 million people. To suggest (NYC or NYCMetro) has a pop of 20 million when the entire state is about at 19.6M is ludicrous.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Demographics_of_New_York_City Tables on the left will show what the actual city and state pops are, but if you scroll down to the Population section, you get a nice clean population statistics from 1698 to 2014.
I'm not sure I can trust any person with figures if they can't do a simple search.
And for those that think wiki is always untrustworthy:
http://quickfacts.census.gov/qfd/states/36/3651000.html
I didn't say there weren't older cities out there. I'm simply explaining part of why NYC is the way it is.
If you look at Paris, London and Tokyo, they're all wasteful as well.
Maybe not AS wasteful as NYC.
The title of the article is "The World's Most Wasteful Megacity". Saying "ZOMG NEW YORK IS FOUR HUNDRED YEARS OLD!!!!!!111ONE!!" is not an interesting response to the claim that it's the world's most wasteful megacity, given that there are several more efficient megacities older than it. It might be a useful example as a response to claims that megacities are inefficient in general, as it applies to many of the megacities in question, especially the developed-world ones.
But that could simply be a function of something else as well.
Well, given that they're older than New York, yeah, unless age makes cities more efficient, it's a function of something other than age.
In any case, they're actually comparing large metropolitan areas; as I noted in another post, "New York", for the purposes of their study, actually includes a hefty chunk of suburban New Jersey, New York, and Connecticut, much of which was much more recently developed.
But to be honest, I think there are other CO2 factor which the emission alone do not take into account : the investment to make megacity (beton/aslphalt is not zero emission + construction etc...) and the transport of food and water from far flung place to feed the megacity. by concentrating population, you also concentrate pollution, epidemics, and local water consumption. Factors which could be very problematic especially water.
C. Sagan : A demon haunted world:
http://www.amazon.com/gp/product/0345409469/
visit randi.org
Sigh.
400 years? That's all?
Apparently London is rather more efficient, which is implied by saying NY is the worst by large margin. It's also been there rather longer. William the conqueror built the tower shortly after 1066 and the Romans called it Londinium.
So, age is no excuse. In fact, N.Y. Is clearly planned with it's nice regular grid of streets. Actually they were going to do that in1666 after a large amount of London burned to the ground but the residents had other ideas and rebuilt very very fast when they heard about a pending government land grab.
Anyway, we have lots of stuff. A good underground rail network, a decent surface rail network (with really awful operators, Fuck you southern), lots of busses, many of them hybrid, river buses, congestion control and so on.
Southwark also has a massive recycling facility (worth a visit on open days if you like vast and complex machines). Recycling and trash get collected only on alternate weeks. Anything even vaguely compostable gets collected weekly and goes into a giant municipal composted which can deal with near, bones, fat and all the things you don't want at home.
It's not perfect, but it shows you can lower the impact of large and old cities.
SJW n. One who posts facts.
Using taxis for everything because the lower classes take the train is a lifestyle choice.
That's still a lot more efficient than what most other Americans do, which is drive 30-60 minutes each way on their daily commute, using their own car.
Taxis are very good for the citylife compared to a car, and it's a nice way to share fixed costs. But CO2 wise taxis are a lot worse since they have lots of dead mileage when they aren't transportning anything. Bicycles though is a good alternative now in NYC, it's nice that they are doing streetdesigns to help people transport themselves by switching between bike/bus/walk/metro.
Okay, what do you expect? NYC (in one form or another) has been there for FOUR HUNDRED YEARS (the area was first settled in 1624). It's been a massive metropolitan settlement for the better part of the last two hundred.
It's not as if someone went back to 1700 or so and started out with a city planning commission and 2015-level civil engineering technology. So yes, the city's going to be ANYTHING but efficiently run, plumbed, or laid out.
As opposed to London, Paris, and Tokyo, which were designed and built during the last 50 years, and thus are more efficient.
Tokyo is still no my to-visit list but have you ever been in London or Paris? Neither London nor Paris were gutted and rebuilt to anything like the extent that Tokyo or Berlin were so I'm not exactly sure what you mean by designed and built during the last 50 years. The best you can argue is that London and Paris incrementally improved the part of their infrastructure relevant to this discussion over the last 50 years while New Yorkers sat idle.
You need management. You need it badly. Vote Enviro Giuliani to the office! On a more serious note, this would be a nice beginning of a marketing pitch for smart city project.
But that could simply be a function of something else as well.
Now you're getting it.
The age of the infrastructure is definitely part of the situation, but there is more to it than that.
for the U.S, I suppose.
Sigh. Why do people take an argument and ad absurdum it without trying to understand what is being said and what isn't?
In this case it was probably because one would have to pick up the argument and take it out of absurdum to get anywhere.
For the US NYC might be considered an old city, but when comparing to other large cities around the world its very modern.
The town I live in still have a couple of houses from early 1600 standing and compared to other cities my town is considered young.
Boy, the author is really mad, that's the only fact that clear here. Why he can't show the trash and energy usage per capita? Probably because he really doesn't have that data.
NYC is one of the most visited cities in the world. Much energy is used, and much trash produced, by large numbers of people that don't live there. How about at least considering the number of people that commute into the city every day for work as well. I'm sure there are a list of other considerations as well, like how the data is collected for each city and if it represents the city proper or its metropolitan area, or if you can even trust data from some countries.
Its fine to be mad, but if one can't get past it enough to even think about the 'why' then maybe one needs to take a breather.
Everyone knows nobody drives in NYC. There's too much traffic.
By liberal self-loathing. I drive a crew cab pickup to work alone every day.
Americans. He was a troll, but in this case, also not wrong.
Any troll worth its salt should be, if not technically correct, not obviously wrong. How can a troll provoke discussion if it can be disregarded as an idiot from the start.
People in Brazil are Americans, people in Hawaii aren't. The lifestyle in NYC is by no means representative of the average Americans lifestyle, even if it might be representative of the US.
In the rest of the world, we generally call citizens of the USA "Americans". Someone in Brazil would be a "South American". Someone in Hawaii would be an "American".
To have a right to do a thing is not at all the same as to be right in doing it
without one mention of Agenda 21.
The preceding post was not a Slashvertisement.
One should jump to conclusions too fast. NYC and other first world cities have such a bad eco-balance because all their consumerables and devices are built with a huge resource payoff and complex processes, not recycled, replaced often for no reason and so forth. All out unregulated meat 'production' (one of the largest single causes of modern first world eco-imbalance) and modern mono-agriculture also is a big problem. In that regard the 2nd worlds garbage dumps in the slums in far-east asia or south-america are just about as eco-efficient as a society can get. After all, they're living of our garbage(!!).
If we would tax consumption accordingling, people would be way more cautious about getting that new car or repairing the washing machine by simply tossing it out and getting a new one. Direct recycling would be more of a thing (don't get the impression those bags and pouches are cheap) and we'd shake our heads at the insanity of todays throw-away culture. Our consumption society is the problem. It's only that no one in china or india - or most of any other places for that matter - gives a shit about the environment that we can throw away a t-shirt after one season or get a brand-new smartphone every odd year.
Fix that and the entire planet can live in an utopia and we can add another 10 - 20 billion people without even breaking a sweat or nature noticing.
It's like Gandi said: The world easyly has enough for everyones needs - it does not have enough for everyones greed.
We suffer more in our imagination than in reality. - Seneca
But CO2 wise taxis are a lot worse since they have lots of dead mileage when they aren't transportning anything.
That's the thing: this simply isn't true in NYC. They aren't ever not transporting anything there: as soon as they drop off one person, a new rider is right around the corner.
In other American cities, taxis are horrible ecologically because they spend so much time empty, just like you say. Not in NYC, because the ridership is very high.
Per capita might not be fair.
Cities are not useful only for their inhabitants, they serve a function for the whole economy. Since resources are concentrated, value can be created more efficiently, economies of scale, and whatnot.
Another way of seeing it, is how much waste for NYC generate per dollar. It has a GDP over 1400 billion dollars.
This means that, if you were to get rid of NYC, because it's too wasteful, you would need around 4 or 5 large cities to replace the value it creates.
Probably, resource-wise, and waste-wise, nyc is not that inefficient, when you take into account, in your efficiency equation, that its value is much larger than hosting several million people.
This is so misleading!
New York may be "wasteful" among megacity peers (I don't know), but "New York is the greenest city in the United States" (http://www.newyorker.com/magazine/2004/10/18/green-manhattan). This article totally changed my views about thinking about environmental issues:
"Most Americans think of New York City as an ecological nightmare, but in comparison with the rest of America, it is a model of environmental responsibility New York is one of the greenest cities in the world 82% of Manhattan residents travel to work by public transit. If New York City were granted statehood, it would rank fifty-first in per-capita energy use The key to new York’s environmental benignity is its extreme compactness Tells about moving to a small town in rural Connecticut. Our move was an ecological catastropheNew York City’s extraordinary energy efficiency arises from the characteristics that make it surreally synthetic Dense cities are scalable, while sprawling suburbs are not. Discusses the historical and geographic accidents that produced New York’s remarkable population density. Compares Los Angeles and Washington D.C. to New York. Tells about the way that Washington’s parks and wide boulevards reduce urban vitality by preventing people from moving freely. Mentions Jane Jacobs’s “The Death and Life of Great American Cities.” Writer contacts a representative of the Sierra Club’s Challenge to Sprawl initiative and says that Manhattan meets many of their anti-sprawl suggestions. The representative agrees, but says that emulating New York is not appealing to the people the Sierra Club is trying to persuade Environmentalists tend to treat New York as an exception rather than an example. Compares New York to Phoenix. Phoenix, whose population is a little more than twice that of Manhattan, covers more than two hundred times as much land. Discusses the idea that New York’s traffic congestion urges drivers to take public transportation. Tells about the blackout of 2003 Much of the blame was placed on New York, but people who live in New York use less than half as much electricity as people who don’t. Tells about the high property taxes paid by Con Ed Discusses energy-efficient building architecture, comparing 4 Times Square (The Conde Nast Building), where The New Yorker’s offices are located, to the Rocky Mountain Institute’s headquarters in Colorado. If you divided the Conde Nast Building into forty-eight one-story suburban office buildings, added parking and green space, you’d end up consuming at least a hundred and fifty acres of land. The R.M.I.’s famous headquarters is sprawl Discusses the minimal ecological benefits of recycling Tells about the environmental damage caused by cars. Mentions David Goodstein’s “Out of Gas: The End of the Age of Oil.”
Cram as many people as possible in to the smallest space possible where they are easily controlled.
used in massive quantities by NYC residents, TFS forgot to mention Performance-Enhancing Drugs
In terms of the metrics, NYC is penalized for the following: temperature extremes, humidity extremes, tall buildings (plumbing, elevators, etc), and a number of other lesser factors.
NYC is benefitted by the fact that they don't grow anything, or really manufacture much.
NYC should strive to do better. Buildings should be better insulated, HVAC systems should be more efficient, heat recovery should be more widely used, lighting needs to be upgraded with more efficient solutions, and the subway should really try to improve efficiency.
But all these best and worst rankings are bunk without proper context.
Clearly you haven't spent time in NYC, it is FAR, FAR, FAR more dense than London. My sister used to live in London and I live in NYC it is just a very different city. NYC is centered around Manhattan, period and that is the only part of the city where transit truly is pretty good. Most people don't live there, most people commute in from the outer boroughs or suburbs and unlike London where suburban trains are actually somewhat fast in NYC they aren't very good and are expensive, for a husband and wife commuting together to Manhattan it is actually cheaper and depending on the time faster to drive than to take commuter rail. Grids sound like a good idea but for traffic purposes they cause a lot of problems. New York is at a distinct disadvantage because like the Asian cities it is VERY dense but unlike the Asian cities the infrastructure and design is decidedly 19th century, people live a more Americanized/Western lifestyle, and the weather requires that 3-4 month out of the year you require heating and 3-4 months of the year require massive amounts of air conditioning. The most densely populated places in London cannot even compete on density with Hoboken NJ, let alone midtown Manhattan. People in Manhattan have a pretty small foot print ecology wise with heating and cooling small spaces being the largest energy consumers, the issue is the suburban homes 50 miles away where someone drives through traffic to join 1.5m commuters onto a rather small island.
http://weirdandamazingtravel.a...
now stop yer whining
Remember kids, if you're not paying for the service, YOU ARE THE PRODUCT THAT IS BEING SOLD.
Not to mentioned, that New York is an aged Metropolis. The ones in Europe, were ravaged by Two World Wars so they were rebuilt with more modern technology. The ones in other parts of the world are much newer.
If something is so important that you feel the need to post it on the internet... It probably isn't that important.
People in Brazil are South Americans. Just because you Europeans don't understand geography doesn't mean you get to redefine it.
Gamingmuseum.com: Give your 3D accelerator a rest.
What do they produce?
This US gov't site - http://www.eia.gov/state/?sid=... - lists New York state #50 in terms of per capita energy consumption. I recall reading elsewhere - sorry, no citation - that the energy consumption of a resident of NYC is 60% of the average in the USA, which makes sense based on personal experience. I, like many New Yorkers, don't own a car; most of my travel is by foot, bike or public transit, like most people I know who live here.
NYC is among the NEWEST of the mega-cities. In was fairly small until the 1800's.
My God can beat up your God. Just kidding...don't take offense. I know there's no God.
Actually New York has half the population density of London. Next question.
http://www.citymayors.com/stat...
Guess fuckin' what?
I don't fuckin' care - ya wanna know fuckin' why?
'Cuz I don't live in your little fuckin' world: I live in fucking New York City.
So, GO FUCK YOURSELVES!
(apologies to Michael Keaton)
New Jersey was full.
Why does nyc use so much more energy than Tokyo or london or Paris? Because it snows there. Duh.
Also, nyc is trapped in ancient infrastructure. Not much has been added since the Verazano narrows bridge. Even modest changes are opposed by nimby and shortsighted antitax fools like Chris Christy. Tokyo, on the other hand, was completely razed in 1945 by firebombs and now benefits from that.
"As opposed to London, Paris, and Tokyo, which were designed and built during the last 50 years, and thus are more efficient."
Paris and London are both very old and they were not "leveled" during WWII.
See my blog http://ilovecookes.blogspot.com/ for light hearted technical information.
Paris hasn't been ravaged by any World Wars. The latest big changes in Paris took place in the 19th Century under Napoleon when he decided to build the "Grands Boulevards" for improved circulation, with the added benefit of better crowd control in case of unrest. Trying to build anything new in Paris is a nightmare.
You can end right there. YONKERS isn't the same as NYC let alone fucking CT.
Can everyone who's familiar with the area agree that including New Haven in NYC as a 'megacity' is bullshit, clickbait FUD and not give this ANY credence?
If not, can we include Plattsburgh NY in NYC, because Amtrak goes there . . .
I'll be over here in Sandy-battered Jersey, thankyouverymuch
You didn't think I was going to say sandy beaches, now did you?
yeah, those Europeans and their lack of geographical knowledge. They'll never find their way around the world.
Next thing you know they will have towns and cities all named after north american towns and cities. Then to further make up for their own complete lack of identity and culture they will be speaking our beautiful languages.
Can you blame them though? I mean just look at their run down infrastructure, political corruption, police corruption, gang problems, drug problems, bankrupt derelict cities, lack of privacy, lack of personal freedoms and rights, militarised police forces etc.
Silly Europeans.
"git a rope." (c) others.
the larger and older the agglomeration of civilization and stuff, the creaker and more wasteful things get. for instance, the 1930s control system for the subways, much of which has yet to be modernized. with oceans rising and hurricanes becoming more destructive in coming years, nature will clear the decks.
if this is supposed to be a new economy, how come they still want my old fashioned money?
That's not accurate either. Your statistic for NYC includes Staten Island. While technically one of the five boroughs, Staten Island is not "the city".
When people talk about NYC, they're probably talking about Manhattan. And the population density of Manhattan is 10,194/km. And that's roughly double what's listed for London on your referenced table. Of course, I've only spent about 12 hours in London, so I don't know shit about it, and that figure could include land area that isn't really urbanized.
Numbers without context can be misleading.
"As opposed to London, Paris, and Tokyo, which were designed and built during the last 50 years, and thus are more efficient." Paris and London are both very old and they were not "leveled" during WWII.
Hint: it's called "sarcasm".
As opposed to London, Paris, and Tokyo, which were designed and built during the last 50 years, and thus are more efficient.
Tokyo is still no my to-visit list but have you ever been in London or Paris?
I've been to all three.
Neither London nor Paris were gutted and rebuilt to anything like the extent that Tokyo or Berlin were so I'm not exactly sure what you mean by designed and built during the last 50 years.
I mean "the only way "ZOMG NEW YORK CITY IS 400 YEARS OLD!!!!!111ONE!!!" would be a useful response to "New York City is the world's most wasteful megacity" would be if the other cities were shinier and newer."
I.e., I was being sarcastic.
The best you can argue is that London and Paris incrementally improved the part of their infrastructure relevant to this discussion over the last 50 years while New Yorkers sat idle.
Which may well be the case - but, again, that renders New York's age not a particularly relevant point, as the more efficient cities are older.
But for all practical purposes Tokyo is about 70 years old.
See my blog http://ilovecookes.blogspot.com/ for light hearted technical information.
When TFA is talking about megacities, it's discussing conurbations and greater metro areas, not just the city proper. Tokyo+Yokohama+Chiba+etc, New York+White Plains+Newark+Bridgeport, and London out to at least the M25.
The locally-defined boundaries of the city proper have very little to do with how people live in it. The fact that South Chicago is inside city limits and Elizabeth, NJ is in a different state doesn't change the fact that they're both lower- and working-class heavy industry neighborhoods on the edge of their metropolitan area.
But more to the point, defining "city" as "the central part with the skyscrapers" is not useful, because an insignificant number of people live there -- much less than 10%, in the case of New York.
When we're talking about densely populated cities, it's not the condo towers that are important: it's square miles of four-story walk-ups. That's true in London, New York, Tokyo, everywhere.
Mexico city is way way older than New York.
Or Mexico City
>There are also 8.5 MILLION PEOPLE in the NYC metropolitan area.
Actually, no. There are 8.5 million people in New York City proper (the 5 boroughs). The NYC metropolitan area has a whopping 23.5 million people.
I know a lot of New Yorkers. None of them buy truckloads of crap to throw away. Suburbanites on the other hand....
Yeah well, Boston's smaller, and founded nearly at the same time (6 years later), and we grew up to be the Hub of the entire universe. So stick that in your pipe and smoke it, Jeter.
Seriously? Your GPP, titled 'Feel free to move into a cave,' does so little to understand the position of the article, with so much hyperbole, that it's essentially a straw man. Did you try to understand what's being said and what isn't in TFA? Pot, kettle, etc.
Sigh. Why do people take an argument and ad absurdum it without trying to understand what is being said and what isn't?
Because Slashdot mods feed into this kind of shit due to personal bigotry with no basis in logic? That's my guess.
This is the same reason you can get away with speaking shit about so many subjects even if you're plainly wrong and get modded up while people who actually come to the table with facts and cites get ignored or modded down for not goose stepping to the same drum.
It's this kind of groupthink that has made me stop trying to actually contribute to Slashdot in a meaningful fashion to just simply trolling.
The fucktards in command are slicing their own throats.
Did you read the article? He repeatedly points out how bad NYC is on a per-capita basis, not just absolute. To quote just a few examples:
"The New York metropolis has 12 million fewer people than Tokyo, yet it uses more energy in total: the equivalent of one oil supertanker every 1.5 days,”
The average New Yorker uses two dozen times more energy than someone in Kolkata, and creates 15 times as much solid waste.
Yes, NYC is one of the most visited cities in the world. So are Tokyo, Paris, and London, all of which use less energy and produce far less waste. That doesn't explain it.
"I'm too busy to research this and form an educated opinion, but I do have time to tell everyone my uninformed opinion."
No, he did not present a single per capita comparison. Read it again. You tell me how NYC compares per capita to other major cities, not just Tokyo. And who cares about Kolkata, that was probably chosen because it is uniquely low. And while you are at it, tell me how the data was collected that provided an apples to apples comparison. Conveniently ignored.
I wasn't trying to explain it, just pointing out how poorly the author did making his case or explaining the basis. When there is such a huge discrepancy, it is wise to double check and validate they are reasonable comparisons, which it appears this guy didn't even attempt to do.
Critical thinking is a valuable skill.... try it sometime.
And while you are at it, tell me how the data was collected that provided an apples to apples comparison.
No problem. There's a link to the paper right there in the summary.
No, he did not present a single per capita comparison.
Ummm... How does, "The average New Yorker uses two dozen times more energy than someone in Kolkata, and creates 15 times as much solid waste," not count as a per-capita comparison? Of course, you then blindly dismiss it by saying, "And who cares about Kolkata, that was probably chosen because it is uniquely low." The 14 million people who live there certainly care. And no, it was not chosen for being uniquely low. Take a look at the graphs in the paper. You'll see there is only one outlier in the whole set of cities, and that is New York. And yes, I did follow the link to check the paper before I posted. Because I actually believe in doing my research before posting. (See my signature quote, which in case you hadn't realized is meant ironically, and is appropriate to a distressing fraction of posts on Slashdot.)
"I'm too busy to research this and form an educated opinion, but I do have time to tell everyone my uninformed opinion."
You need to know how to deal with raw data, the author doesn't. Look at the adjusted charts and you get a different picture.
Kalkata, as can be seen from the charts, is a city with a lot of people not even connected to the grid, or even basic sewer facilities for that matter. If you want to make the comparison, make note of the significant factors that drive the differences, its not that hard. How about the industrialization factor? You think that should just be ignored by the author?
Also from the study itself;
-Energy consumption data were scaled by population (from 20,314,077 people to 266 22,214,518 people
-New Jersey energy consumption data for 2006 were used in the total energy 268 consumption calculation for New York Metropolitan region for 2011
So it is clear that they didn't have actual numbers, and used consumption numbers from a higher energy use period (2006) for a lower energy use time-frame (2011) (energy use decline some during the recession). Again, it only take a few minutes for me to find all these relevant things the author so eagerly dismisses. Its his job to back up his point, not mine.
I am not criticizing the study or the numbers in it. Don't conflate the two. I am criticizing the author of the posted article and his apparent mis-use of the data, lack of thoroughness in explaining his conclusions, and lack of critical analysis. I think my point stands quite well. I would guess if you read the study in detail, you will find notations of factors that can account for some of the big variances.
"The New York metropolis has 12 million fewer people than Tokyo, yet it uses more energy in total: the equivalent of one oil supertanker every 1.5 days,”
But from the study report itself;
TOKYO: Study area population: 35,622,000
NEW YORK CITY: Study area population: 22,214,518
Aren't you glad there are critical thinkers who can find these types of major mistakes? Lesson to you, when there is a significant outlier in the data, put on your critical thinking cap, it pays to take a closer look.
Ignore my last post. I am the one who made an error. The author had the comparison correct as far as people, I should have heeded my own advice and taken in little more time in my response, I read the numbers backwards. Not afraid to admit when I am wrong.
But you can still find there are reasons for the discrepancy if you look at the charts in total, which show NY very similar in usage per capita adjusted as other large cities.
But I do owe an apology for the tone of my last reply. I should take more time when responding.
That was under Napoleon 3rd (2nd Napoleon being a useless, dead one)
I once read that in year 1869 workers were busy day and night, lighted by arc lamp projectors.
A shit ton of houses, buildings etc. were destroyed, old Paris was a medieval maze and had horrible sanitation. One of the big philosophers of the 18th century described how it smelled like horrible shit even before you really got into it.
New York City needs to overhaul everything concerning garbage. In my neighborhood, 5-10 different garbage trucks drive around in the night -- not one truck only because of ridiculous and stupid privatization. Those antiquated garbage trucks spew out horrible exhaust fumes. Anyway, In New York City, garbage is thrown on the sidewalk. Homeless people then open the bags to find refundable bottles and sometimes they forget to close the bags. People in New York City pretend to be environmentally aware or whatever, but the way they sort recyclables betrays them. My recommendation for New York is to install garbage and recycling stations on every block-or-so and have those stations manned by professionals that can guide and educate the people.