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Comment by lmm | Hacker News Reader

Sounds like you're throwing a bunch of arguments at the wall and hoping some of them stick rather than trying to figure out what's true. Wealth is presumably fixed at first-order, so comparing equally wealthy rural or urban residents seems fairest (unless you're trying to argue that cities are bad because they increase economic growth?); if the argument is something like "emissions are only higher in rural areas because rural residents are more likely to own cars because they're wealthier", that doesn't really refute the notion that rural is worse for the planet, it just means that poor people can't afford rural lives. I can't even follow what your unsourced talk of sub-urbanization is trying to claim.

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.

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I am not thowing things.

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.

[1] https://www.nature.com/articles/s41598-017-15303-x

I agree that including upstream GHG is important, but you've got to compare like with like - is there any evidence that upstream-included GHG emissions are higher for urban than for rural? What would the mechanism for that be - are urban people consuming more things (or more energy), are things for urban markets produced less efficiently than things for rural markets (why?), ...?

Concrete usage is sufficient to illustrate the mechanism.

- 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...

OK, so concrete and cement more generally have high environmental impact. Do cities use more of them per capita, and if so, how? (And also, who is actually benefitting from that use - are we talking about concrete infrastructure like highways that are mostly for the benefit of those living outside the city?) Given that city dwellers generally have smaller homes than equivalent rural dwellers, share walls, and drive far shorter distances, I would've thought those living outside would end up being responsible for more cement use.

For cities to be able to exist, they need a steady supply of food, energy, people, and goods brought in from the surrounding areas. Remember, cities are basically parasitical organizations, being both financial, real material, and population sinks on net: they need to constantly import people, goods, food, and money, otherwise the city will not survive. They are the center of transportation networks sending goods into the city. There is not a single city anywhere that is self-sufficient in any of these areas, but there are rural regions which are self-sufficient in one or two of these categories (but rarely all four).

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?

> For cities to be able to exist, they need a steady supply of food, energy, and goods brought in from the surrounding areas. Remember, cities are basically parasitical organizations, being both financial, real material, and population sinks on net: they need to constantly import people, goods, food, and money, otherwise the city will not survive.

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.

> cities are net consumers of food and people but net producers of goods and money (otherwise how would they buy all that food?)

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.

> 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.

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 even follow what your unsourced talk of sub-urbanization is trying to claim.

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.

[1] https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Goodhart%27s_law

> 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.

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).

Urban and suburban are different lifestyles though. Suburban residents typically have a SFH and need multiple cars to do their errands and commute. Residents of an urban core would be more likely to live in multi family housing and use public transportation or walk/bike to their errands and job. Disputing a rural v urban GHG comparison by pointing to suburbs doesn’t make sense in that model - a suburban lifestyle is much closer to a rural one as both are car-dependent.

> if the argument is something like "emissions are only higher in rural areas because rural residents are more likely to own cars because they're wealthier", that doesn't really refute the notion that rural is worse for the planet, it just means that poor people can't afford rural lives

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.

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