To most people, big, densely populated cities look like ecological nightmares, wastelands of concrete and garbage and diesel fumes and traffic jams. But, compared with other inhabited places, cities are models of environmental responsibility. By the most significant measures, the greenest community in the US is New York City, the only US city that approaches environmental standards set elsewhere in the world.
The average New Yorker generates 7.1 tonnes of greenhouse gases annually; that is more than the average Swede, who generates 5.6 tonnes, but it is less than 30 percent of the US average of 24.5 tonnes. Residents of Manhattan, the most densely populated of the city’s five boroughs, generate even less.
The key to New York’s relative environmental benignity is its extreme compactness. Manhattan’s density is approximately 67,000 people per square mile (2.59km2), or more than 800 times that of the US as a whole and roughly 30 times that of Los Angeles.
Moving people closer together reduces the distances between their daily destinations and limits their opportunities for reckless consumption, as well as forcing the majority to live in some of the most inherently energy-efficient residential structures in the world: apartment buildings.
New Yorkers, individually, use less water, burn less fossil fuel and produce less solid waste. Their households also use much less electricity: 4,696 kilowatt hours per year, compared with 16,116 kilowatt hours in Dallas, Texas.
Most important, New York’s highly concentrated population and comprehensive public transit system enable the majority of residents to live without owning automobiles, an unthinkable deprivation almost anywhere else in the US. Some 82 percent of employed Manhattanites travel to work by public transit, bicycle or on foot. That’s 10 times the rate for Americans in general, eight times the rate for workers in Los Angeles County and 16 times the rate for residents of metropolitan Atlanta.
CRAM TOGETHER
At an environmental presentation last year, I sat next to an investment banker who was initially skeptical when I explained that New Yorkers have a significantly lower environmental impact than other Americans.
“But that’s just because they’re all crammed together,” he said.
Well, yes. He then disparaged New Yorkers’ energy efficiency as “unconscious,” as though intention were more important than results. In fact, unconscious efficiencies are the most desirable ones, because they require neither enforcement nor a personal commitment to cutting back.
I spoke with one energy expert, who, when I asked him to explain why per capita energy consumption was so much lower in Europe than in the US, said, “It’s not a secret, and it’s not the result of some miraculous technological breakthrough. It’s because Europeans are more likely to live in dense cities and less likely to own cars.”
In European cities, as in Manhattan, the most important efficiencies are built-in. And for the same reasons.
China and many other non-Western countries are rapidly urbanizing. That is, their populations are undergoing a general migration from rural areas to cities. This trend, which has been under way worldwide for decades, is often decried by US environmentalists, who generally prefer people to move in the opposite direction, toward “the land.”
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