Comment by retrac | Hacker News Reader

Comment by retrac | Hacker News Reader

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Great point. There'd be compelling reasons to stop poisoning ourselves ASAP even if we weren't boiling ourselves alive in the process.

Ontario phased out coal electricity for a mix of natural gas and renewables in the early-mid 2000s. Climate wasn't the primary motivator. Regular air pollution was. Smog has essentially disappeared from Toronto. I haven't had burning eyes and a scratchy throat on what would have once been bad summer days in almost two decades personally (atmospheric NO2 levels): https://files.ontario.ca/2086-figurea35-en.jpg Atmospheric mercury levels alone have fallen by 40%. I didn't even know so much Hg in the environment came from coal ash!

> An independent assessment conducted by Toronto Public Health in 2014 suggests that improvements in Ontario’s air quality have translated into significant health benefits for Ontario residents. Toronto Public Health found that improvements in Toronto’s air quality from 2000 to 2011 have reduced air pollution-related premature deaths by 23% (from 1,700 to 1,300 per year) and hospital admissions by 41% (from 6,000 to 3,550 per year) in Toronto alone.

This argument is mostly against cities though. Nowadays humans don't need to be tightly packed into pollution centres. Efforts should be made to make city living as expensive as possible since it's harmful for the environment. Internet has made cities pretty much obsolete anyway.

Sure, if you're fine with

- never having a medical emergency

- driving 30 minutes to get food

- never going anywhere you can't drive home from

it's not an argument against cities if we can get rid of emissions in cities. and we can.

That's... completely backwards? City dwellers have the smallest environmental impact.

Air quality within cities is actually a totally different issue from whether living in a city is in and of itself harmful for the environment.

As the OP mentioned, reducing fossil fuel usage within city centers (both power generation and vehicle usage) can dramatically reduce smog and improve air quality within the city. While even more dramatically reducing the city dwellers' environmental footprint.

Living in the suburbs is reliant on largely fossil-fuel burning vehicular transport, which even if electrified, is substantially less efficient than mass transit, cycling, or walking, all of which are much more feasible within a city. Not to mention the sheer land area used for pavements and stormwater drainage and such in spread-out areas.

I’d suggest that dense city living without the suburban sprawl would be the ideal. Pack the people in, and free up as much open space and agricultural land as possible.

In cities, there's less need to drive with walkable areas, and a scale that better supports mass transit. Smaller land footprint, and smaller homes take less energy to heat or cool. Economies of scale in providing goods and services. Ships release less CO2 than trucking, and lots of cities have ports. If you don't like cities that's one thing, but the environmental impact is pretty unequivocally less than suburban or rural living.

It's a little more complicated -- if living in a city means that you switch from a car to public transit, that's a major environmental win. If living in a city means you switch from a free-standing house to an apartment building, that's a smaller but substantial environmental win. Sewers are generally better than septic tanks, trash collection is more efficient when people live closer together, and so on.

Cities concentrate pollution and completely overwhelm the local environment's capacity to absorb human impacts. However, they generally reduce overall pollution when compared to suburban or rural living at the same income level.

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