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Comment by mmjaa | Hacker News Reader

No, I completely disagree with you. Having travelled the world, I feel the worst thing we can do is continue with the big cities. They need to be dismantled, and replaced with smaller, lighter, more local communities that do not require so much energy to maintain - very big city requires immense resources to keep it running, every single day.

More rural living is what will save us, imho.

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Do you know what the most energy efficient people moving device is? The counterweight elevator. It's true. Cramming a village worth of people into a highrise, surrounding it with walking distance amenities is by far the most efficient, environment friendly way of supplying said populace. Yes, you need trucks to stock said stores but then again, no matter where they live you'd still need those trucks and this way a) economies of scale apply b) they don't go anywhere in single use cars. Instead of going rural, cities with mass transit is the way to live if we are this many. Reducing the populace slowly would be a strategy but it's not what the reality is.

This is why i hate cars.

Cars should be the most taxed and difficult to obtain. Cars are why humans in dense to be areas suck. Work backward from eliminating cars from daily life.

Bollocks. It takes amazing amounts of oil to get the cheap stuff to the cities. The only reason these are more 'efficient' is because of arbitrary pricing - if we placed a higher value on oil-consumption, in terms of cost to the Earth, the cheap plastic junk wouldn't be being subsidised by our childrens future.

I know its not a popular opinion, but the things that take so much oil to make and transport and deliver to the people, are there so that city people can live another day without pitching into the abyss.

Rural living is better for the Earth. If I can walk to my neighbour and get butter, instead of driving to a shopping mall (air conditions) to buy it from a source originally half a country away, please explain to me how this is 'more energy efficient'. It makes no sense whatsoever, unless one is simply so enamoured by the luxuries of city life that one can't see the forest for the trees.

Cities are expensive to build, maintain, and they are destroying our future. Abandon!

Your problem is going to be that you not only need butter but also need a myriad other things and only a few of those can be self sufficient in a small local community. Yes, we shouldn't truck things from half a country away but that doesn't mean the energy consumption / CO2 footprint at the end of the day will be lower for a sprawl than a dense city.

Yes, cutting back to medieval times, wearing homespun, most amenties supplied by the local blacksmith and cobbler and some things supplied by traveling merchants , that'd obviously be more environmentally friendly. I doubt most people are ready to do that. And also -- Malthus would like to have a word with you. No way you can supply this many people with such technology.

Yes, the ultimate green solution is to decrease the amount of people living on Earth but check how China did with the one child policy.

The funny thing is that it isn't more friendly because efficiency produces big gains - look at just how much more land is required for organic farming vs conventional practices - let alone lower tech subsistence farming which amounts to 'slash and burn and then move on when the soil has depleted', heck even cooking fires produce far worse air pollution than propane stoves.

Local and small scale may 'feel cozy' but they aren't efficient - they were abandoned for a reason.

>>instead of driving to a shopping mall (air conditions) to buy it from a source originally half a country away

You should realize that population density makes it much easier to avoid driving long distances to get things, as distribution points can be centrally located. You seem to have an issue with vehicle-dependent suburban sprawl, which is justified, but ultra dense walkable "New Urban" cities are much better at resource distribution than rural communities.

Yes and no. If we're still shipping food to Wal*Marts, then yes. If we're growing food locally, then maybe no. I get the whole economy of scale and specialization argument, but not all costs are comparable. A rural community growing and eating food doesn't necessarily have to burn gas. They might be poorer than if they did burn gas to import and export crops, but they can make trade-offs to reduce gas consumption that aren't available in high-density areas.

Where is your neighbor getting their butter?

Probably from a cow milk and a bit of manual labor. Making butter is not a rocket science.

Cities provide services much more efficiently than rutal areas, but people in cities tend to consume much more. I've only seen one analysis of the issue, but the effect of that increased consumption was surprisingly big.

If your definition of city is anywhere not rural, (ie the suburbs) then I could see consumtpiom being higher since there is more stuff to buy. But living in a big city I consume much less resources because of basic facts like every item inside my small apartment has to be physically carried in by me and I have no car. I go to Costco sometimes and people with cars easily get 10 - 20x the weight of goods.

Right, but how often are they going in to get those goods? Being able to transport more in one go means being able to take less frequent trips.

Except that is false.

A person living in a big city uses drastically less resources and energy than a rural person does.

Less/no driving, smaller more energy efficient dwellings (apartment blocks = way more efficient heating/cooling), vastly less infrastructure per capita, etc.

Nonsense. Factor in all the oil that was used to build the resources the city dweller depends on, and to maintain those resources. Factor in the sheer energy waste of cities.

An honest appraisal cannot lead to the conclusion that cities are good for us, energy-wise.

If you factor all of that in, it is less.

What resources are those that the rural dweller doesn't have? Still need roads, walls, pipes, etc. The majority of rural dwellers still have electricity lines and water pipes going out to them.

Actually I think you could both be right. Like for like cities are more efficient but I recently saw a statistic that said 50% of us live in cities but cities consume 70% of our resources. Consumption clearly has as much to do with wealth as where you live.

> Factor in all the oil that was used to build the resources the city dweller depends on, and to maintain those resources. Factor in the sheer energy waste of cities.

You need to be more specific, what specific resources are you talking about? All the resources that city dwellers depends on are also required in the villages (if we want to maintain the same standard of living), but there you usually need more of them per capita.

> very big city requires immense resources to keep it running

Because they have immense numbers of people living in them?

Anecdotally, living in a high-rise building, I am amazed how much more inefficient living in a single-family house is. From unused space and heat loss to the accumulation of junk in the garage/basement/backyard and constant ongoing maintenance of everything, it just seems to be so much waste of resources for the benefit of 2-4 people living in it.

>Because they have immense numbers of people living in them?

Because those people do less to support their own survival locally, and therefore cities require immense intake of energy and resources every day, in order to maintain that lifestyle.

>Because those people do less to support their own survival locally

That seems to be a critical modification what you originally said. Are you trying to argue that humanity can keep its current quality of life in a less resource intensive manner by spreading out, or are you arguing that we should decrease our quality of life and go back to creating food and goods on our own?

If you take city dwellers and put them all in rural areas, 90% of them are not going to start farming enough to keep themselves fed or farm at all. They are just going to order the food from somewhere else and have it shipped to them, only now the shipping will have to travel a much wider area to get to everyone

>Are you trying to argue that humanity can keep its current quality of life in a less resource intensive manner by spreading out, or are you arguing that we should decrease our quality of life and go back to creating food and goods on our own?

Both. We should spread out, gain more local independence in terms of energy harvesting, and we should also change our lives to be not so dependent on massively energy-hungry activities .. like driving 4 miles to get a burger from a drive-through.

> driving 4 miles to get a burger from a drive-through.

That sounds like suburbia. People who live in high density cities don't really do these things. We just walk downstairs.

Like the other posters in the thread have concluded. I don't see how you could be correct at all. Everything you've described in terms of energy inefficiency is something that describes suburbia. Cities have large energy requirements but that's due to the number of people there, they don't have high energy requirements per capita.

If you can show some math that shows how having a few thousand people in walking distance of a few restaurants has a higher energy requirement than spreading those same few thousand people around the country and having them stay fed _without them farming their own food_ then you might start to have an argument here but for now this seems in the realm of impossibility

Specialization means that they just require fewer resources overall.

It's less resource intensive for me and my neighbors to have one person do the agriculture than for all of us to.

It's cheaper and more efficient still if I have 30 million neighbors.

Rural areas have a much larger ecological footprint than urban areas, per capita. There's no way around that.

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