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Comment by retwe321 | Hacker News Reader

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.

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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.

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.

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.

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.

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