I moved out to the country. Bought a big diesel. Started a farm. My GHGs went way up.
And yet, my lifestyle change has zero impact on climate change.
It's like voting--if you know game theory at all, you know it's a waste of time, just like it's a waste of a life to spend your time calculating and optimizing how "green" you're being. Zero real impact, beyond whatever it makes you feel.
Hey, I enjoy dirt bikes and the shooting guns on my land. My kids do too. Maybe you enjoy riding the bus and being efficient. To each their own. But don't live a lesser life just to live up to some lifestyle meme--whether it's the homesteading trend or the green trend--just do what you like.
I think the voting analogy is good, but I take a different lesson from it. Not that voting is pointless. Individual actions matter a great deal in their cumulative effect.
The only action an individual can take to have an impact at all is to lobby their government.
Maybe people who don't think voting is a waste of time will generate an environment where these decisions are made on a societal level and individual responsibility is less important. Which presumably you'd welcome. It's unlikely.
You're right that families with children living in multifamily dwellings are under-represented on American TV, but that's not because they are rare in real American life. I can think of a few examples of course, like "The Jeffersons", the whole premise of which is how their success led to moving from a house in Queens to an apartment in Manhattan.
In reality, both are homes.
So sure, they aren't going to bars. But they are going to work. They are living in areas where their 6-year-old child can walk to school. Where they can take public transportation to work. And so on.
In suburbia, sure. In urban areas, 3+ bedroom apartments are definitely a thing, as are relatively spacious apartments for their bedroom count, and overlooking luxurious courtyards.
They are as expensive as you’d expect from places where studios are more expensive than suburban 3 bedroom single-family homes, though.
(Most families only need 2-3 bedrooms due to family sizes)
How many large apartment blocs have you lived in? It's not a very enjoyable way to live, particularly with a family.
People want houses, garages, yards, and cars. Don't try to paint the selfish reality of human nature as being corrupted by some propagandistic force against collectivism.
None were decent sized family apartments overlooking a green shady courtyard.
They were all cramped 2-bedroom units overlooking shopping malls, designed for people who didn't want to buy a house in the suburban sprawl around my Midwestern city. The courtyards were decrepit and unmaintained, the only nice green spaces had 'keep off the grass' signs. Obviously no one wants that, it worked as a college student and a newlywed but when we started a family I did, indeed, buy a house. But not because I actually wanted a house, because I wanted something other than the crappy apartments that were in my local market.
My parents recently bought a condo - it's in a green, forested neighborhood in some quiet residential streets, they have a two-car garage, they have four bedrooms - theirs, spare upstairs, office, one downstairs for visiting grandkids, storage space downstairs, upstairs they have a living room, dining room, and large kitchen. Theirs is a duplex, a few of the units in the neighborhood are larger quad-unit townhomes.
As relatively wealthy seniors, they were able to buy that outright. But nothing like that (except regular homes) is available to rent within several hundred miles, as far as I know. Nice apartments are just not a thing that we build, in part because culturally, "nice apartments" is an oxymoron.
The reality is that land in desirable areas is scarce, so people ought to be free to choose the tradeoffs they prefer.
In Italy, my family and I actually did live in a home in a 6 unit building and it was just fine. 3 bedroom, 2 bath. Rather than the yard, the kids would go over to the local park, where they'd actually find other kids to play with, which is way more important to kids than the big yard in the house we rent here in the US.
[0] https://www.theguardian.com/cities/2015/apr/22/pruitt-igoe-h...
Not sure if you have ever lived in an apartment if you think grocery shopping is a “Herculean” task. You just take the elevator and walk a block or two to the grocery store. Furniture is actually easier than in a SFH because you don’t have to struggle to move it up stairs, you just pop it in an elevator. Package deliveries go to a concierge at the front desk rather than being stolen or getting wet on the porch if you’re not home, etc.
In general looking at trends of the 1960s to predict behavior today won’t work - there’s been a trend toward reurbanization in the last 30 years and white flight has reversed and been replaced with gentrification. The “slums” are now being pushed into city outskirts and suburbs themselves.
Absolute GHG emissions and impact are higher for higher incomes. GHG emissions are a function of wealth not geography. Urban areas have much higher concentraions of wealth. They also outsource much of their GHG creation to rural areas but are still the cause/consumer of it (concrete, energy, minerals, construction materials).
Also the perceived reduction in GHG emissions for urban areas is only true of late stage developed nations. Developing nations, those building out new cities, do not share the per capita efficiencies of full developed nations. The reason for this is that perceived per capita GHG reductions in developed nations were paid for by high GHG emissions of their past. New data on urban sprawl (sub-urbanization) sheds doubt on the idea that even developed nations cities per capita GHG emissions are lower than rural areas.
Ultimately, urbanization is a bulk consumer of Earth's natural resources and not a producer of those inputs.
Put simply: Cities are eating the Earth.
EDIT: Added point about sub-urban development negating efficiencies.
Also, suburban lifestyles are by far the most carbon intensive. Transportation by car and heating/cooling large houses uses a ton of energy.
The post you were replying to gave an argument for why GHG emissions would be lower in urban areas that, while not necessarily proven, at least passes the sniff test.
There are two primary forms of measuring GHG:
--
A. Territorial GHG emission accounting
B. (Absolute) GHG footprint accounting
--
A. Measures GHG released with in the territorial borders.
B. Measures upstream GHG released outside the territory but consumed within.
--
Moving a coal plant across state lines doesn't reduce the GHG impact of a state, it merely removes the accounting from the states balance sheet.
--
You can read more in the Reducing Urban Greenhouse Gas Footprints [1] paper below.
- https://www.theguardian.com/cities/2019/feb/25/concrete-the-...
- https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Environmental_impact_of_conc...
- https://www.statista.com/statistics/273367/consumption-of-ce...
So I very much doubt that road networks linking the cities with each other and with the surrounding rural areas are for the benefit of the rural areas more than for the benefit of the city, although certainly both sides obtain some benefit.
This goes all the way back to Rome. Why did all roads lead to Rome? For the benefit of the provinces, as an act of generosity on the part of Rome, or so that a stream of goods can be brought into Rome and consumed there?
Nonsense; cities are net consumers of food and people but net producers of goods and money (otherwise how would they buy all that food?), and rural areas benefit from the things produced there (otherwise why would they buy them?).
If cities were parasitical we'd expect areas with cities in to support smaller populations than equivalently-sized rural areas, which is false. You're putting the cart before the horse: why do people go to the city to seek their fortune? Because it's impossible for them to make a living in the country. Why are all the homeless people in the cities? Because in the countryside they'd starve.
The question we should be trying to answer is: for a fixed capacity of resources (land area, water, permitted GHG emissions, ...), how can we support as many people as possible. Having the majority follow efficient urban lifestyles does a lot better on that metric.
Let's be careful with our terms. Money is produced in the Bureau of Engraving. What you mean is that people within cities earn a higher income, which is true. Urban populations have higher incomes and consumption. But that means that money is flowing into the city from outside. Every time you swipe your credit card, someone in Manhattan gets a cut. Every time you buy an online ad, someone in Silicon Valley takes a cut. When you buy insurance, someone in Hartford takes a cut. Money from all over the country flows into cities.
So why does money flow into the city? For the same reason that a marketplace makes money or a platform makes money. It is a schelling point, helping to bridge the gap between intrinsic worth and market worth. The app you wrote is great but it wont make any money without a platform to run on. The baseball player may be a hall of famer but his pay will be determined by the stadium he plays in. Cities are generally where various professionals, managers, and administrators concentrate, and these earn higher incomes as they provide support services or organizational services to the rest of the economy.
> If cities were parasitical we'd expect areas with cities in to support smaller populations than equivalently-sized rural areas, which is false
I don't mean parasitical in a moral sense, but in the sense of the flow of real quantities (as we are talking about transportation along roads), because the value add of cities is organizational in nature rather than productive in nature. What we see is that if you create a high population rural area, a bigger city will spring up somewhere in the middle of it, just like if there are more producers, a bigger marketplace will emerge to be the focal point of those producers.
> why do people go to the city to seek their fortune?
Because that is where higher income/higher consumption opportunities lie. Just like why every company wants to be a platform. Or why ambitious corporate types want to be near the HQ. If you are a budding manager or would-be corporate lawyer, do you set up your shingle in Bullhead City, AZ, or in NYC? You want to be where all the money flows so you can be there to receive a cut. That's not to say you are stealing or being lazy. Obviously the competition to get that cut is fierce.
> The question we should be trying to answer is: for a fixed capacity of resources how can we support as many people as possible.
There is not a single pattern. You need a market place and you need producers to meet in that marketplace. Life is heterogeneous.
I assumed money was shorthand for value. If cities are running a balance-of-payments surplus compared to rural areas, that's because they're producing more value (I guess people move into the city when poor, do a bunch of valuable work that makes them rich, and then move out of the city), so it's weird to frame that as "parasitical on money".
> I don't mean parasitical in a moral sense,
Then why use such a morally loaded term?
> but in the sense of the flow of real quantities (as we are talking about transportation along roads), because the value add of cities is organizational in nature rather than productive in nature.
You're drawing an artificial distinction between "real" and not. The farmer who grows the food, the engineer who produced the fertilizer, the chemist who did the fundamental research, the banker who loaned them the capital... you can portion out the crop yields between them, but no-one's contribution is more real than the other, given that at the end of the day without any of them there'd be fewer kilos getting grown. If you want to compare the value of things that different parts of a society are producing, your measurement for that should be, well, value.
> There is not a single pattern. You need a market place and you need producers to meet in that marketplace. Life is heterogeneous.
Sure, but there are better and worse ways to do it. Put it this way: for someone on the margin at the moment, if they switched from a rural to an equivalent (and that's a whole other can of worms) urban lifestyle or vice versa, in which they were equivalently productive for society, would they be consuming more or less resources/GHG emissions/...?
I can't find the paper at the moment. I will try to get it posted here tomorrow.
The gist is that suburban grow is an overflow of city growth onto the surrounding area. When a suburban areas GHG accounting is taken into consideration it further removes any "apparent" per capita efficiency of the city.
It is really all just another case of Goodharts Law [1] with the addition that the measure was never comprehensive in the first place.
I'm happy to believe that suburban lifestyles are inefficient, but I don't find that a good argument for discouraging urban lifestyles - wouldn't that increase rather than decreasing suburban sprawl? (E.g. if you limit development in city centres, that's going to push more of it to nearby suburbs).
They don't clearly state their argument, so maybe I'm wrong here, but I'm pretty sure they're arguing an inverse correlation. IE: Urban areas produce less because urbanites are on the whole a wealthier population.
If this is true, wouldn't it lead to ridiculous conclusions like a cow farmer being responsible for the GHG emissions of all his cows?
Oil industry spinned us to calculate personal carbon foot prints [1]. That’s a good tool, but at the same time it dissolves the responsibility. In one hand the people actually producing the harm get to blame consumer demand and consumer can aknowledge that what ever they do makes no difference in the big picture.
If you go to work somewhere and release lots of gasses heating the planet you should probably think long and hard why you are doing that.
[1] https://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2021/aug/23/big-oi...
Are you saying this is actually how GHG calculations are done with respect to rural/urban, or that's how it should be counted?
>consumer can aknowledge that what ever they do makes no difference in the big picture.
a single consumer can't make a difference because they're one person out of 7 billion. consumers in aggregate can make a difference.
My city is heated with district heating, which comes from coal. Thats big chunk of my personal carbon footprint and makes living in a city look bad vs rural life.
I think focusing on consumers and making this about urban/rural lifestyle choices is only half the equation and to change things you need to go in and swap the power plants, farms etc.