>the huge elephant in the room is that it is insane that cities are more expensive when city dwellers consume less resources
50% of the world lives in cities yet they consume 70% of the worlds energy.
50% of the world lives in cities yet they consume 70% of the worlds energy.
The figure you quote, aggregated at the global level, entirely results from a comparison of city lifestyle with pre-industrial countryside lifestyles in developing countries. By contrast, living in the countryside or in suburbia in rich nations is much more environmentally damaging than in dense urban areas, which is what gp was referring to.
Literally pre-industrial [1]. Last numbers I saw from the UN estimated 2 billion subsistence farmers as of 2015, all living without the benefit of modern agriculture except the occasional bag of fertilizer or engineered seeds. The future is very unevenly distributed.
If "developed cultured" is fixed by pricing the externalities, it would be absolutely better to pack people in cities, replace subsistence farming with sustainable industrial agriculture (no tilling, no aquifer depletion, etc.) and decrease the portion of land devoted to agriculture.
We're not comparing to the third world here, we're comparing across models of living in the developed world.