New York, the greenest city in the US
Individually, New Yorkers have some of the smallest carbon footprints in the United States
My bookclub tends to read fiction, ranging from established literature, such as The Picture of Dorian Gray and Anna Karenina to the absolutely silly, like Sense and Sensibility and Sea Monsters. Our group does, however, read a fair amount of nonfiction as well. We’ve delved into history, biography, science; we’ve even read a book about land surveying.
Our reading choice this last month was The Ghost Map, a chronicle of the cholera epidemic that gripped London in 1854 and how Dr. John Snow knocked on doors, tested water samples, and finally deduced that the locus of the infection was a single water pump on Broad Street.
In an afterward, tying the circumstances of 19th century London to the present day, author Stephen Johnson mentions in passing that New York is the greenest city in the United States. I think that just about everybody at our bookclub was surprise to learn this environmental factoid.
I first came across this notion when I read David Owen’s 2012 book The Conundrum, which focuses on such ironies as how increased efficiencies can actually have the opposite effect of making folks use more resources and create more climate change. He also destroys most folks’ notion of green living—a single-family home in a bucolic rural setting—and makes the case that is actually New Yorkers that are the greenest of Americans. Those inhabitants of the huge amalgamation of steel, glass, and concrete are the ones saving the planet, not the folks who make their homes among the aspens and pines in the mountains
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I should have been unsurprised as to how surprised some folks were to learn of this. I remember being quite struck by this irony when I first ran across it. Per capita, New Yorkers are responsible for some of the lowest greenhouse gas emissions in the world. 5.9 metric tons per person per year. This is on level with some of the world’s lowest emitting cities, such as Stockholm and Tokyo. And the city is working on bringing that number down further. The carbon output of an average New Yorker is less than one third of the 19.0 metric tons emitted by the average American every year.
How New Yorkers do it
One of the biggest drivers of climate change is transportation. Prepandemic, in 2017, transportation accounted for 29 percent of total greenhouse gas emissions in the U.S. That year, collectively, Americans drove about three trillion miles. Though their streets are clogged with cars, New Yorkers, for the most part, contribute next to nothing for transportation CO2. Most New York City households do not even have a car, with 54.4 percent of New York City households being carless.
Instead of getting into a car, most New Yorkers opt for other forms of transportation. cycling, riding the subway, or just plain old-fashioned walking, all of which are very low or zero for carbon emissions. Overall, 76.7 percent of New Yorkers get around by these non-automobile modes of transport (USA average 24.5%), with almost ten percent of commuters getting to work by walking.
Size matters
The image of New York is one of bigness. The Big Apple had been home to the world’s tallest building for decades and still boasts having some of the greatest skyscrapers in the world. But in other ways New York is a place of the very small. The average size of a New York apartment is 866 square feet, what many Americans might consider cramped compared to their suburban McMansions. (The median size of a new single-family home in 2017 was 2,426 square feet. This figure that has steadily risen. Back when this data first became available, in 1973, a single family home was 1,525 square feet.)
These smaller homes need less energy to keep warm in winter or cool in summer. Also, in suburbia, where most Americans live, each house is warmed and cooled individually. A New Yorker, living in an apartment, has only one wall facing the cold or heat from outside. This leads to New York having some of the lowest per capita use of electricity in the country. An average New York resident uses six milliwatt hours per year, less than half of the 12.2 milliwatts used by the average American.
The Chairman, Frank Sinatra, sings of the verve and excitement of the great city. And it’s green, too!
Those smaller living quarters also help New Yorkers to save the planet in another more indirect way. All of us, even New Yorkers, are slaves to consumerism. We all just love to have more stuff. A study published in the Journal of Industrial Ecology back in 2015 found that household consumption accounted for more than 60 percent of worldwide greenhouse gas emissions, most of which was from food consumption (36%), but about half as much of that, (17%) was from our buying manufactured products, things like lawnmowers, sofas, chairs, spoons, everything we fill up our houses with.
Now the larger your house, the more stuff you find to fill it up. We suburban dwellers, with our garages, tend to fill those garages with chainsaws, lawnmowers, and other requirements of suburban living. Guest bedrooms are filled with guest beds and other furniture. New Yorkers have no need for such toys. Without that sort of space, New Yorkers just don’t buy as much stuff as the rest of us do.
To my environmental chagrin, much of the way I live in San Diego is quite the opposite of New Yorkers. The biggest difference is how much I drive. The car trip just to get to my bookclub was over 40 miles round trip. How about you? Do you live in a green city? How does your city—Denver, Seattle, Terre Haute, Huntington—compare to New York for green street cred?
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