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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.
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.
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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.
The PNAS paper to which the article attempts to refer (with a file: link, so the link is completely worthless) does mention LA, and, if you see Figure 1[1], LA is behind NY for total energy use, water use including line losses, and total solid waste production. The caption says "Values shown are for the megacity populations scaled on a per capita basis from recorded data for the study area population"; I don't know whether that means "we scaled the values based on the population sizes", so that they represent per capita consumption, or whether they represent total consumption.
[1]Yes, you did see what I did there. :-)
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).
So if they're going to compare New York to Tokyo, applying the same logic, they should include the entirety of Japan as part of the "Tokyo Megacity."
They didn't go quite that far - "Tokyo", the megacity, is
For those who are curious, "London", the megacity, is
and "Paris", the megacity, is
.
See the paper's supplementary material for a full list.
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.
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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.”