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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.
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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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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.
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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. :-)
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.
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").
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.
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.
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.
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