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Comment by staplers | Hacker News Reader

Living in NYC, your food, clothing, electronics, most resources are transported to you by giant boats or trucks. You don't get to act environmentally superior because you outsource your transport.

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How is that different from any suburb? You do get to act environmentally superior for using up less land to live, and using public transportation.

Most pollution comes from the energy used by motors to move people from one place to another, which is obviously more in a suburb environment rather than an walking environment.

Most pollution doesn’t come from “motors to move people”. Transportation is 14% globally and 28% for US, however that includes every kind of transportation - trucks, large ships, cars, trains, etc.

https://www.epa.gov/ghgemissions/global-greenhouse-gas-emiss...

Largest sector globally is industry and heat, followed closely by agriculture.

Big cities may be superior in some respects, but they are also the symptom of a larger problem - it’s a lot more of us on this planet than were pre-industrial.

I'll bite. Of those three industry and agriculture I can have no control over. Both are going to be roughly the same in the suburbs as in the cities. However heat is radically different if you live in an apartment than if you live in a detached house on a plot of land. Not only are you sharing walls with other people but also your living spaces tend to be much smaller. Smaller also tends to mean less 'stuff' which means less industry to produce such stuff. Smaller also tends to mean less building material which again reduces industry. That combined with the much reduced energy costs of transportation means that city living is much better for the environment than outside the cities.

The downvotes for your comment makes no sense and highlights how ideologically sensitive HN has become. The biggest contributing factors to greenhouse gases and pollution more broadly are high per capita consumption (due to a modern standard of living that goes well beyond transportation) and population growth. And no, being in a city does not somehow make you magically more efficient to an extent that offsets the additional per capita impact.

The per capita consumption is hugely magnified for people living in single family homes with yards and garages. That type of low density housing makes it impossible to create mass transit options, or even cycling and walking, all at the same time increasing distances of travel for everyone and subsequently all the infrastructure that has to be installed along that distance.

Giant boats and trucks moving things in bulk is, pound for pound, way more efficient than every single person riding a 2 ton machine to move things around.

Those giant boats are incredibly polluting.

Then stop buying things from overseas. But if you're trying to use this as an excuse to tell yourself that everyone individually driving everywhere is fine for the environment you're engaging in motivated reasoning.

it's actually vastly more efficient and centralized; goods are transported to all stores like that, but in cities like NYC there's no last mile GHG emission.

I mean tons of the last 7/10 of a mile is done by old beat up delivery trucks, with much less capacity than 18 wheelers, that idle in traffic or idle double parked in the turning lane. I'm not going to argue that cities aren't more efficient but the picture that city-dwellers (self-satisfied New Yorkers in particular) paint about their environmental and ecological impact tend to be a very narrow window of the overall impact of their choice to live there.

I'm not quite sure what you're getting at. People in urban areas have lower carbon footprints than people in car-dependent suburban and rural areas. No one has a zero or negative carbon footprint unless they do something to actively offset their emissions. I don't think most city dwellers are self-satisfied jerks. A few are, but then does it really have anything to do with the city?

Ultimately, poking people in the eye about their consumption habits is counter-productive. Cities are efficient, but not efficient enough to prevent global warming. This problem is only going to be solved through technical innovation and government regulation.

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