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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.
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>
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.
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.
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.