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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.
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.
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
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.
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THANK GOD!!!
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>
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
New York City is probably more productive than most of the other cities cited in the article based solely on their raw populations.
It depends how you define productive. Tokyo and New York are the most productive cities in the world by GDP by a wide margin, each being more productive than about 90% of the countries in the world.
As to waste, what percentage of that was paper? NYC has more law firms than you can imagine. Although you know all the little food places where you can grab a sandwich by wall street? They don't tend to have recycling bins...
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.
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.
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.
Um... No.
Tokyo and NYC may well have the highest GDP, but how much of that do you think is local, and how much is attributes revenue because companies are housed there, and therefore it gets attributed their external revenues? How much of it is banks that are 'based' in NYC and yet do most of there earning externally?
Corporates? other national chains? etc?
I would suggest that actual production capability of NYC is actually quite low, as there will be very little real production there, even if you count IP creation, etc.
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. :-)
Really, it is full of incompetent financiers that need socialism to save them from themselves.
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).
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.
I didn't think NYC had "detached" homes...
They do, although some of those might be multi-family homes (for what it's worth, Trulia claims that this house at the intersection of 109th Avenue and 164th Place is a single-family home).
But their definition of "New York" is the "megacity", which includes more than New York City; it includes:
which, I guess, means that, as a resident of Ocean Township, New Jersey, I grew up in "New York", and there were plenty of detached single-family homes where I grew up ("plenty" as in "all the homes in my neighborhood").
As a resident of Suffolk County, about half the land area is pine barrens and farms. It sounds like they're deliberately stretching the definition of "city" to include a lot of territory that most honest people would not consider metropolitan at all. Many of the other counties they're including are in a similar state of relatively sparse population.
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."
=Smidge=
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.
SJW n. One who posts facts.
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.
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.”
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.
Isn't that the truth?
I knew a guy who got a job at a big law firm in Manhattan, but had to move across country on three day's notice to take it. The firm found him a place to live that was two hours away and told him that was pretty normal. He lasted about 2 years before he was completely burned out, divorced, etc, even though he loved the work.
I've been offered jobs that would require either (a) spending half of my income on a tiny apartment and/or sharing with 7 other strangers or (b) an hour+ commute to work, and been told I was crazy for passing up such opportunities. And I say go f*** themselves. Even if it were something I completely loved to do, the tradeoffs aren't even close to worth it. There have to be other options.
Now, I'm not a big-city person to begin with -- give me peace, quiet, seclusion, and starry skies please! -- but I'd certainly consider reasonable or short-term concessions. Losing 10-20 hours a week for no reason and for years on end is crazy. And if you get defensive about it because that's what you yourself do, you're crazy too. Sheesh.