The World's Most Wasteful Megacity 186
merbs writes: The world's most wasteful megacity is a densely populated, steadily aging, consumerist utopia where we buy, and throw away, a staggering amount of stuff (abstract). Where some faucet, toilet, or pipe, is constantly leaking in our apartments. Where an armada of commerce-beckoning lights are always on. Where a fleet of gas-guzzling cars still clog the roadways. I, along with my twenty million or so neighbors, help New York City use more energy, suck down more water, and spew out more solid waste than any other mega-metropolitan area.
But... (Score:2, Offtopic)
Yeah, you're #1 for waste, but how do you do on housing prices? A detached average home in Toronto or Vancouver now runs more than $1,000,000 CDN (which is somewhere around $820,000 USD.)
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Re:But... (Score:4, Interesting)
I didn't think NYC had "detached" homes...
They do [google.com], although some of those might be multi-family homes (for what it's worth, Trulia claims that this house at the intersection of 109th Avenue and 164th Place [trulia.com] is a single-family home).
But their definition of "New York" is the "megacity", which includes more than New York City; it includes:
which, I guess, means that, as a resident of Ocean Township, New Jersey, I grew up in "New York", and there were plenty of detached single-family homes where I grew up ("plenty" as in "all the homes in my neighborhood").
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As a resident of Suffolk County, about half the land area is pine barrens and farms. It sounds like they're deliberately stretching the definition of "city" to include a lot of territory that most honest people would not consider metropolitan at all. Many of the other counties they're including are in a similar state of relatively sparse population.
So if they're going to compare New York to Tokyo, applying the same logic, they should include the entirety of Japan as part of the "Tokyo Megacity."
=Smidge=
Re:But... (Score:5, Informative)
So if they're going to compare New York to Tokyo, applying the same logic, they should include the entirety of Japan as part of the "Tokyo Megacity."
They didn't go quite that far - "Tokyo", the megacity, is
For those who are curious, "London", the megacity, is
and "Paris", the megacity, is
.
See the paper's supplementary material for a full list.
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As a resident of Suffolk County, about half the land area is pine barrens and farms. It sounds like they're deliberately stretching the definition of "city" to include a lot of territory that most honest people would not consider metropolitan at all. Many of the other counties they're including are in a similar state of relatively sparse population.
What the paper says is
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It's something about Americans that make them measure their dicks from the balls up.
Not that any of the authors of the paper are working at universities in the U.S.. The first author in the list of authors [utoronto.ca] got his degrees from universities in the UK and Canada, so I'm guessing he's not a fellow Yank.
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I checked the price and it seemed reasonable, and then I checked the map and found out why it was so cheap. It's closer to JFK airport than the length of the main runway at JFK. It's also pretty much right along the flight path. Only 14 miles to Times Square, which sounds close, but Google Maps says the trip takes about an hour. So I guess we should expect lots of traffic.
My aunt lives about 10 km from Pearson International in Toronto. There's so many planes, it's almost unbearable. Mind you, she lives in
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Isn't that the truth?
I knew a guy who got a job at a big law firm in Manhattan, but had to move across country on three day's notice to take it. The firm found him a place to live that was two hours away and told him that was pretty normal. He lasted about 2 years before he was completely burned out, divorced, etc, even though he loved the work.
I've been offered jobs that would require either (a) spending half of my income on a tiny apartment and/or sharing with 7 other strangers or (b) an hour+ com
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Wrong point. (Score:5, Insightful)
New York is only the most wasteful global megacity because it's full of Americans. The more important point is that New York City is the most environmentally friendly place in the United States, when measured by pollution emitted per capita. (See this list [wikipedia.org] of CO2 emissions by state: New York State, whose population is tightly focused in NYC, has twice the CO2 emissions per capita as the more sprawling development in Florida, and one New Yorker is worth *four* Texans.
To improve its environmental standing, America needs *more* dense urbanized areas like NYC, not less.
wrong way around (Score:4, Informative)
"09 New York 158 2.93% 19,501,616"
Gut feeling : maybe a lot of Co2 emission are due to the petro industry, oil extraction and methane burning ? Just guessing it might not be due 100% to commute/shipping only.
Yep , mostly industrial (Score:3)
State Residential Industrial Transportation
new York 30 5 66
texas 10 226 187
Most of the energy consumption is industrial by a factor 22 for for CO2 emission. There is a lot of emission for CO2 on transportation, but it is unclear how much is due to industry exporting stuff outside. The things is, when looking at transportation texas is an outlier (along with California and florida), despite other state having
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Point taken: Texas is a special case. Maybe a fairer comparison is New Jersey or Connecticut: both have similar climates and similar amounts of industrial activity, but New York emits significantly less per capita than either, both overall and specifically for transportation.
Agreed (Score:2)
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I replied to another post in this thread with stats on solid waste and water usage. New York does very well on those measures, too. IMO cities have a fundamental economy of scale which gives environmental benefits across the board.
I just wish I could find environmental stats that were broken by urbanization level rather than by state...
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also.. cities in asia don't count waste, therefore it doesn't happen.
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also.. cities in asia don't count waste, therefore it doesn't happen.
i still can't understand why anyone would want to live in such a smelly, high-traffic, crowded, noisy concrete jungle voluntarily. does hustle and bustle impress people that much? oh and gang violence is basically unheard-of in quiet suburban and rural areas. and having a yard for your child to play in is something they really seem to appreciate.
really in this area we have such crimes as "a drunken man was cited for disturbing the peace and public drunkenness because he was loudly arguing with his trash
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But the 3 days worth of food is simply silliness. Do you think people don't have food at home? What will turn NYC (and any big city into a nightmare) is the absence of electricity. The city will grind to a halt with that. One day is fine - but by day 3 that could be a real problem. And as time goes on and police and fire are unable to respond the situation can turn bad quickly. Without electricity there are no phones, no refrigeration, no coo
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To improve its environmental standing, America needs *more* dense urbanized areas like NYC, not less.
As batteries, solar, wind, microgrids, EVs, etc. . . become cheaper and cheaper, I wonder if this still holds true. As we see more and more small communities become self sufficient [solarcity.com], the traditional argument for moving towards centralized efficiency will be harder and harder to make. Looking at how decentralized technologies have defined recent history, I would not bet my money on investments that depend on increased centralization at this point. . ..
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You go ahead and live in your little 1000stft apartments, riding on filthy subways, walking in the heat and the rain from the station to your work/home, getting mugged (by the cops or the bad guys), never really seeing the sun [washingtonpost.com], etc.
I'll stay in my 2,400 sqft home, with deer in the back yard, a nice greenbelt in the neighborhood (where you don't get mugged), the smell of wildflowers, a 10 minute commute (5 minutes to the grocery store), and low crime.
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Actually I live in the country, in a house pretty much like yours. The problems of cities are obvious and well known: my point is that environmental damage and waste are not among them. And as we move toward a world with scarcer resources, you and I may have little choice but to move into town.
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Yeah...fuck that.
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"Little 1000 sqft apartments", boy are you a hick from the sticks:
Home Shrunken Home
New York’s First Micro-Apartments, Prefabricated in Brooklyn
http://www.nytimes.com/2015/02/22/realestate/micro-apartments-tiny-homes-prefabricated-in-brooklyn.html [nytimes.com]
Re:Wrong point. (Score:4, Interesting)
I think you're trying to bait me on the "should EPA regulate CO2 as a pollutant" news item, but the relevant point is that fuel usage (and CO2 emissions) was one of the submitter's complaints, about New York, along with solid waste [biocycle.net], which New York state produces the least of of any state, and domestic water use [usgs.gov], in which it's merely below average.
Apples, meet oranges. (Score:2, Insightful)
New York City is probably more productive than most of the other cities cited in the article based solely on their raw populations.
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New York City is probably more productive than most of the other cities cited in the article based solely on their raw populations.
It depends how you define productive. Tokyo and New York are the most productive cities in the world by GDP by a wide margin, each being more productive than about 90% of the countries in the world.
As to waste, what percentage of that was paper? NYC has more law firms than you can imagine. Although you know all the little food places where you can grab a sandwich by wall street? They don't tend to have recycling bins...
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Um... No.
Tokyo and NYC may well have the highest GDP, but how much of that do you think is local, and how much is attributes revenue because companies are housed there, and therefore it gets attributed their external revenues? How much of it is banks that are 'based' in NYC and yet do most of there earning externally?
Corporates? other national chains? etc?
I would suggest that actual production capability of NYC is actually quite low, as there will be very little real production there, even if you count IP c
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And being Capitol of the World has to count for something too.
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Re:Apples, meet oranges. (Score:4, Funny)
Really, it is full of incompetent financiers that need socialism to save them from themselves.
Product? (Score:2)
What do they produce?
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Collateralized Debt Obligations [wikipedia.org]
So what? Feel free to move into a cave. (Score:3, Insightful)
Okay, what do you expect? NYC (in one form or another) has been there for FOUR HUNDRED YEARS (the area was first settled in 1624). It's been a massive metropolitan settlement for the better part of the last two hundred.
It's not as if someone went back to 1700 or so and started out with a city planning commission and 2015-level civil engineering technology.
So yes, the city's going to be ANYTHING but efficiently run, plumbed, or laid out.
There are also 8.5 MILLION PEOPLE in the NYC metropolitan area.
As part of the US Northeast Megalopolis, it's the center of a population of 53 million people.
Even if everyone was a card-carrying Greenpeace member, that's STILL a metric fuckton of waste. Urban living simply can't be environmentally neutral.
But, for that matter, living in a cave isn't environmentally neutral either.
Even with the cleanest, most environmentally conscious methods of living close to nature, over time a primitive community's garbage midden will overwhelm it.
But hey, if you want to volunteer to be one of the people forced to shiver in a cave because modern society is so wasteful, be my guest.
A better and more humane course of action would be to adapt over time. Nothing lasts forever, not even NYC. It can, slowly, be rebuilt and repurposed, given a long enough time frame.
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Actually, New York City has an excellent history of pre-planning. Wikipedia. While it's true it's not the 1700s, remember that the population was significantly lower then. And "New York City" as people know it wasn't even formed until the late 1800s when the four outer boroughs joined Manhattan.
But, yeah, infrastructure technology is hard to plan for.
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NYC also has NIMBYism that prevents solving a lot of the problems. They really have the worst solution to dealing with garbage than just about any other first world city: they ship it somewhere else.
Re:So what? Feel free to move into a cave. (Score:5, Insightful)
Okay, what do you expect? NYC (in one form or another) has been there for FOUR HUNDRED YEARS (the area was first settled in 1624). It's been a massive metropolitan settlement for the better part of the last two hundred.
It's not as if someone went back to 1700 or so and started out with a city planning commission and 2015-level civil engineering technology. So yes, the city's going to be ANYTHING but efficiently run, plumbed, or laid out.
As opposed to London, Paris, and Tokyo, which were designed and built during the last 50 years, and thus are more efficient.
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Okay, what do you expect? NYC (in one form or another) has been there for FOUR HUNDRED YEARS (the area was first settled in 1624). It's been a massive metropolitan settlement for the better part of the last two hundred.
It's not as if someone went back to 1700 or so and started out with a city planning commission and 2015-level civil engineering technology. So yes, the city's going to be ANYTHING but efficiently run, plumbed, or laid out.
As opposed to London, Paris, and Tokyo, which were designed and built during the last 50 years, and thus are more efficient.
Tokyo is still no my to-visit list but have you ever been in London or Paris? Neither London nor Paris were gutted and rebuilt to anything like the extent that Tokyo or Berlin were so I'm not exactly sure what you mean by designed and built during the last 50 years. The best you can argue is that London and Paris incrementally improved the part of their infrastructure relevant to this discussion over the last 50 years while New Yorkers sat idle.
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As opposed to London, Paris, and Tokyo, which were designed and built during the last 50 years, and thus are more efficient.
Tokyo is still no my to-visit list but have you ever been in London or Paris?
I've been to all three.
Neither London nor Paris were gutted and rebuilt to anything like the extent that Tokyo or Berlin were so I'm not exactly sure what you mean by designed and built during the last 50 years.
I mean "the only way "ZOMG NEW YORK CITY IS 400 YEARS OLD!!!!!111ONE!!!" would be a useful response to "New York City is the world's most wasteful megacity" would be if the other cities were shinier and newer."
I.e., I was being sarcastic.
The best you can argue is that London and Paris incrementally improved the part of their infrastructure relevant to this discussion over the last 50 years while New Yorkers sat idle.
Which may well be the case - but, again, that renders New York's age not a particularly relevant point, as the more efficient cities are older.
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"As opposed to London, Paris, and Tokyo, which were designed and built during the last 50 years, and thus are more efficient."
Paris and London are both very old and they were not "leveled" during WWII.
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"As opposed to London, Paris, and Tokyo, which were designed and built during the last 50 years, and thus are more efficient." Paris and London are both very old and they were not "leveled" during WWII.
Hint: it's called "sarcasm".
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But for all practical purposes Tokyo is about 70 years old.
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I didn't say there weren't older cities out there. I'm simply explaining part of why NYC is the way it is.
If you look at Paris, London and Tokyo, they're all wasteful as well.
Maybe not AS wasteful as NYC.
The title of the article is "The World's Most Wasteful Megacity". Saying "ZOMG NEW YORK IS FOUR HUNDRED YEARS OLD!!!!!!111ONE!!" is not an interesting response to the claim that it's the world's most wasteful megacity, given that there are several more efficient megacities older than it. It might be a useful example as a response to claims that megacities are inefficient in general, as it applies to many of the megacities in question, especially the developed-world ones.
But that could simply be a function of something else as well.
Well, given that they're older than
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But that could simply be a function of something else as well.
Now you're getting it.
The age of the infrastructure is definitely part of the situation, but there is more to it than that.
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Seriously? Your GPP, titled 'Feel free to move into a cave,' does so little to understand the position of the article, with so much hyperbole, that it's essentially a straw man. Did you try to understand what's being said and what isn't in TFA? Pot, kettle, etc.
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Okay, what do you expect? NYC (in one form or another) has been there for FOUR HUNDRED YEARS (the area was first settled in 1624).
There was settlement in the area of Paris TEN THOUSAND years ago. And 200 BC (2200 years ago) they were already building forts.
Same with London, two thousand years old (Londinium founded AD 47).
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Sigh.
400 years? That's all?
Apparently London is rather more efficient, which is implied by saying NY is the worst by large margin. It's also been there rather longer. William the conqueror built the tower shortly after 1066 and the Romans called it Londinium.
So, age is no excuse. In fact, N.Y. Is clearly planned with it's nice regular grid of streets. Actually they were going to do that in1666 after a large amount of London burned to the ground but the residents had other ideas and rebuilt very very fast w
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Actually New York has half the population density of London. Next question.
http://www.citymayors.com/stat... [citymayors.com]
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When TFA is talking about megacities, it's discussing conurbations and greater metro areas, not just the city proper. Tokyo+Yokohama+Chiba+etc, New York+White Plains+Newark+Bridgeport, and London out to at least the M25.
The locally-defined boundaries of the city proper have very little to do with how people live in it. The fact that South Chicago is inside city limits and Elizabeth, NJ is in a different state doesn't change the fact that they're both lower- and working-class heavy industry neighborhoods o
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But more to the point, defining "city" as "the central part with the skyscrapers" is not useful, because an insignificant number of people live there -- much less than 10%, in the case of New York.
When we're talking about densely populated cities, it's not the condo towers that are important: it's square miles of four-story walk-ups. That's true in London, New York, Tokyo, everywhere.
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NYC is among the NEWEST of the mega-cities. In was fairly small until the 1800's.
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Using taxis for everything because the lower classes take the train is a lifestyle choice.
That's still a lot more efficient than what most other Americans do, which is drive 30-60 minutes each way on their daily commute, using their own car. The NYers who do take cabs tend to take them short distances (since everything is closer together there), and they're sharing the same vehicles, instead of all having their own, and then needing giant parking lots for them all.
Yes, it'd be better if everyone just took
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Using taxis for everything because the lower classes take the train is a lifestyle choice.
That's still a lot more efficient than what most other Americans do, which is drive 30-60 minutes each way on their daily commute, using their own car.
Taxis are very good for the citylife compared to a car, and it's a nice way to share fixed costs. But CO2 wise taxis are a lot worse since they have lots of dead mileage when they aren't transportning anything. Bicycles though is a good alternative now in NYC, it's nice that they are doing streetdesigns to help people transport themselves by switching between bike/bus/walk/metro.
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But CO2 wise taxis are a lot worse since they have lots of dead mileage when they aren't transportning anything.
That's the thing: this simply isn't true in NYC. They aren't ever not transporting anything there: as soon as they drop off one person, a new rider is right around the corner.
In other American cities, taxis are horrible ecologically because they spend so much time empty, just like you say. Not in NYC, because the ridership is very high.
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Americans. He was a troll, but in this case, also not wrong.
Any troll worth its salt should be, if not technically correct, not obviously wrong. How can a troll provoke discussion if it can be disregarded as an idiot from the start.
People in Brazil are Americans, people in Hawaii aren't. The lifestyle in NYC is by no means representative of the average Americans lifestyle, even if it might be representative of the US.
In the rest of the world, we generally call citizens of the USA "Americans". Someone in Brazil would be a "South American". Someone in Hawaii would be an "American".
LOL most wasteful (Score:2)
I am sure that's an unbiased article
Smokey Mountain (Score:5, Interesting)
In Manila, there was a trash heap, Smokey Mountain, that was so large that it would regularly catch fire under its own decomposing weight. People made their livelihood there, so that, sadly, one could claim to be 3rd generation Smokey Mountain. It has been shutdown (and grassed over) now, but the new dump-site, Payatas is home to some 80,000 people.
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NYC has solved this problem by trucking its garbage to neighboring states.
BIG ROUND NUMBERS!!! (Score:2, Interesting)
As soon as things are in absolute rather than per capita you know it is BS. Big round numbers mask anything meaningful. If New York has twice the populationof another city, but is compared in absolute terms it is not a useful comparison. I stopped reading once I saw it was a BIG ROUND NUMBERS hatchet job.
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No, you moron, if you actually read beyond two sentences, they talk about per-capita consumption, and it's STILL higher than non-megacity living. But it doesn't stop there. They actually try to find out the reason this is the case. It turns out, even though people living in close proximity use less energy for transportation and so on, the effects of increased wealth cause more energy consumption and waste production overall.
I'm not against increased wealth and better living conditions for everyone. It's jus
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If you're pissed that I called him a moron, you better stop talking, because it seems like the moron label is way too good for you.
Third world populations? No they aren't. The first comparison is with Tokyo. London, Seoul, Moscow, Paris, and Osaka are all in the list as well, and all do better than New York on a per-capita basis. Really, there's no way you can spin this in a positive way or excuse it. The plain truth is that New York is a wasteful fucking city.
Absolute numbers are important and convey one k
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But this isn't about the average American! For fuck's sake, just pay a little attention. We're comparing megacities globally. The pattern of increased consumption in cities persists even when you look at non-American cities.
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Holy fuck man, this is the 3rd time I'm saying this. Do I have to say it ten times more for you to understand? Are you seriously not capable of reading comprehension? That link talks about carbon footprint. That's all. We're talking about a much larger category of waste here.
- The average American produces a lot of waste, higher than all other countries, no matter if they live in cities or rural areas.
- City living is often assumed to be less wasteful, but the numbers indicate that it isn't that simple. Peo
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Garbage collection (Score:3)
The problem is garbage collection runs twice a week in NYC... people are obligated to produce enough waste to keep their cans full.
In all seriousness it isn't fair to compare NYC with Tokyo without compensation for Tokyo being a *much* warmer climate than NYC. I'm not arguing overall point just comparisons need to be apples to apples.
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In Tokyo is not that strange to have snowfall in April. Also, you NEED to turn on the air conditioner from late spring to early auntum. I'm from western Mexico and Tokyo's summer heat is like the one you would espect in Cancún or Puerto Vallarta.
Los Angeles? (Score:2)
It's hard to take seriously an article claiming New York is the most wasteful megacity when they don't even mention Los Angeles. New York metro is 20 million. Los Angeles metro is 18 million.
Re:Los Angeles? (Score:4, Informative)
It's hard to take seriously an article claiming New York is the most wasteful megacity when they don't even mention Los Angeles. New York metro is 20 million. Los Angeles metro is 18 million.
The PNAS paper to which the article attempts to refer [pnas.org] (with a file: link, so the link is completely worthless) does mention LA, and, if you see Figure 1[1], LA is behind NY for total energy use, water use including line losses, and total solid waste production. The caption says "Values shown are for the megacity populations scaled on a per capita basis from recorded data for the study area population"; I don't know whether that means "we scaled the values based on the population sizes", so that they represent per capita consumption, or whether they represent total consumption.
[1]Yes, you did see what I did there. [dourish.com] :-)
And here's the actual PNAS article (Score:3)
Here's the PNAS article [pnas.org], although it's behind a paywall.
The question that comes to mind is "how many ergs were wasted by people clicking the link to the paper that Brian Merchant, senior editor at Motherboard, put in his article, with a file: URL so that it was COMPLETELY FUCKING USELESS unless either 1) you were logged into his machine or 2) you happened to have downloaded the article and stored it in /Users/brianmerchant/Downloads/pnas201504315_7vpr25%20embargoed.pdf on your UN*X box.
Beyond FIXING (Score:5, Funny)
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Just because you don't like it doesn't mean that millions upon millions don't love it. Greatest damn city in the whole damn world.
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Greatest damn city in the whole damn world.
Which is sort of like saying, "Cleanest, best smelling septic tank in the whole world."
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"One would need to start with a giant wrecking ball and remove everything ever built there and then set a population cap on an entirely new city to be built in its place.
Your proposal is acceptable.
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On the other hand, Detroit is adding open space at a pretty rapid rate. Perhaps there's a lesson to be taken away from there.
Fleet of gas guzzlers? Oh please. (Score:4, Funny)
Eco-balancesheeting is a difficult thing ... (Score:3)
One should jump to conclusions too fast. NYC and other first world cities have such a bad eco-balance because all their consumerables and devices are built with a huge resource payoff and complex processes, not recycled, replaced often for no reason and so forth. All out unregulated meat 'production' (one of the largest single causes of modern first world eco-imbalance) and modern mono-agriculture also is a big problem. In that regard the 2nd worlds garbage dumps in the slums in far-east asia or south-america are just about as eco-efficient as a society can get. After all, they're living of our garbage(!!).
If we would tax consumption accordingling, people would be way more cautious about getting that new car or repairing the washing machine by simply tossing it out and getting a new one. Direct recycling [freitag.ch] would be more of a thing (don't get the impression those bags and pouches are cheap) and we'd shake our heads at the insanity of todays throw-away culture. Our consumption society is the problem. It's only that no one in china or india - or most of any other places for that matter - gives a shit about the environment that we can throw away a t-shirt after one season or get a brand-new smartphone every odd year.
Fix that and the entire planet can live in an utopia and we can add another 10 - 20 billion people without even breaking a sweat or nature noticing.
It's like Gandi said: The world easyly has enough for everyones needs - it does not have enough for everyones greed.
6 chinese cities bigger than nyc (Score:2)
http://weirdandamazingtravel.a... [about.com]
now stop yer whining
Doesn't square with simple fact check (Score:2)
This US gov't site - http://www.eia.gov/state/?sid=... [eia.gov] - lists New York state #50 in terms of per capita energy consumption. I recall reading elsewhere - sorry, no citation - that the energy consumption of a resident of NYC is 60% of the average in the USA, which makes sense based on personal experience. I, like many New Yorkers, don't own a car; most of my travel is by foot, bike or public transit, like most people I know who live here.
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Are you trolling or just that stupid? It's hard to tell considering you couldn't even get American correct in your post.
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It's a literal translation of "estadounidense" which means someone from the USA, as opposed to "americano" which means someone from the Americas.
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According to Google translate and the two other translations services i found, the literal translation to that is American not USAian. Perhaps those translators know something the GPdoesn't like proper names.
And that brings us back to my original question.
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My 7 years of Spanish classes called. They said you shouldn't trust Googlle Translate without verification from an authoritative source.
That's the same Google Translate that, when you enter a sentence using Chinese characters, often provides Mandarin pronunciations for some of them and Cantonese pronunciations for others, BTW.
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It's not just Google. Seriously dude, when every other person or translation says you are wrong, it is likely that you are the one who is wrong.
Perhaps your 7 years it took to pass high school Spanish class should have been 8?
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Your ignorance is not my problem, amigo.
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Re:Start spreadin' the rants... (Score:4, Insightful)
NYC is one of the most visited cities in the world. Much energy is used, and much trash produced, by large numbers of people that don't live there. How about at least considering the number of people that commute into the city every day for work as well. I'm sure there are a list of other considerations as well, like how the data is collected for each city and if it represents the city proper or its metropolitan area, or if you can even trust data from some countries.
Its fine to be mad, but if one can't get past it enough to even think about the 'why' then maybe one needs to take a breather.
Re:Start spreadin' the rants... (Score:4, Informative)
Per capita might not be fair.
Cities are not useful only for their inhabitants, they serve a function for the whole economy. Since resources are concentrated, value can be created more efficiently, economies of scale, and whatnot.
Another way of seeing it, is how much waste for NYC generate per dollar. It has a GDP over 1400 billion dollars.
This means that, if you were to get rid of NYC, because it's too wasteful, you would need around 4 or 5 large cities to replace the value it creates.
Probably, resource-wise, and waste-wise, nyc is not that inefficient, when you take into account, in your efficiency equation, that its value is much larger than hosting several million people.
Re:Start spreadin' the rants... (Score:5, Informative)
This is so misleading!
New York may be "wasteful" among megacity peers (I don't know), but "New York is the greenest city in the United States" (http://www.newyorker.com/magazine/2004/10/18/green-manhattan). This article totally changed my views about thinking about environmental issues:
"Most Americans think of New York City as an ecological nightmare, but in comparison with the rest of America, it is a model of environmental responsibility New York is one of the greenest cities in the world 82% of Manhattan residents travel to work by public transit. If New York City were granted statehood, it would rank fifty-first in per-capita energy use The key to new York’s environmental benignity is its extreme compactness Tells about moving to a small town in rural Connecticut. Our move was an ecological catastropheNew York City’s extraordinary energy efficiency arises from the characteristics that make it surreally synthetic Dense cities are scalable, while sprawling suburbs are not. Discusses the historical and geographic accidents that produced New York’s remarkable population density. Compares Los Angeles and Washington D.C. to New York. Tells about the way that Washington’s parks and wide boulevards reduce urban vitality by preventing people from moving freely. Mentions Jane Jacobs’s “The Death and Life of Great American Cities.” Writer contacts a representative of the Sierra Club’s Challenge to Sprawl initiative and says that Manhattan meets many of their anti-sprawl suggestions. The representative agrees, but says that emulating New York is not appealing to the people the Sierra Club is trying to persuade Environmentalists tend to treat New York as an exception rather than an example. Compares New York to Phoenix. Phoenix, whose population is a little more than twice that of Manhattan, covers more than two hundred times as much land. Discusses the idea that New York’s traffic congestion urges drivers to take public transportation. Tells about the blackout of 2003 Much of the blame was placed on New York, but people who live in New York use less than half as much electricity as people who don’t. Tells about the high property taxes paid by Con Ed Discusses energy-efficient building architecture, comparing 4 Times Square (The Conde Nast Building), where The New Yorker’s offices are located, to the Rocky Mountain Institute’s headquarters in Colorado. If you divided the Conde Nast Building into forty-eight one-story suburban office buildings, added parking and green space, you’d end up consuming at least a hundred and fifty acres of land. The R.M.I.’s famous headquarters is sprawl Discusses the minimal ecological benefits of recycling Tells about the environmental damage caused by cars. Mentions David Goodstein’s “Out of Gas: The End of the Age of Oil.”
Re: (Score:2)
In terms of the metrics, NYC is penalized for the following: temperature extremes, humidity extremes, tall buildings (plumbing, elevators, etc), and a number of other lesser factors.
NYC is benefitted by the fact that they don't grow anything, or really manufacture much.
NYC should strive to do better. Buildings should be better insulated, HVAC systems should be more efficient, heat recovery should be more widely used, lighting needs to be upgraded with more efficient solutions, and the subway should really
Re:Start spreadin' the rants... (Score:5, Insightful)
Not to mentioned, that New York is an aged Metropolis. The ones in Europe, were ravaged by Two World Wars so they were rebuilt with more modern technology. The ones in other parts of the world are much newer.
Re: (Score:2)
Did you read the article? He repeatedly points out how bad NYC is on a per-capita basis, not just absolute. To quote just a few examples:
"The New York metropolis has 12 million fewer people than Tokyo, yet it uses more energy in total: the equivalent of one oil supertanker every 1.5 days,”
The average New Yorker uses two dozen times more energy than someone in Kolkata, and creates 15 times as much solid waste.
Yes, NYC is one of the most visited cities in the world. So are Tokyo, Paris, and London, all of which use less energy and produce far less waste. That doesn't explain it.
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I wasn't trying to explain it, just pointing out how poorly the author did making his case or explaining the basis. When there is such a huge discrepan
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And while you are at it, tell me how the data was collected that provided an apples to apples comparison.
No problem. There's a link to the paper [pnas.org] right there in the summary.
No, he did not present a single per capita comparison.
Ummm... How does, "The average New Yorker uses two dozen times more energy than someone in Kolkata, and creates 15 times as much solid waste," not count as a per-capita comparison? Of course, you then blindly dismiss it by saying, "And who cares about Kolkata, that was probably chosen because it is uniquely low." The 14 million people who live there certainly care. And no, it was not chosen for being uniquely low. Take a look at the gr
Re: (Score:2)
[OP] I, along with my twenty million or so neighbors, help New York City use more energy, suck down more water, and spew out more solid waste than any other mega-metropolitan area [utoronto.ca].
It is difficult to tell from your description whether you regret it all or are boasting about this amazing human accomplishment.
The real question might be Is New York City worth it? On the positive side, you cannot easily disentangle its worth from that of the people who emerge from it. Could there be such people if if not for their environment, be it one of splendor (and/or) squalor? Some of the world's finest bartenders [cosmopolitan.com] come from the ranks of burned-out New Yorkers.
Bad examples have merit too. In an era w
"Noo Yawk City?" (Score:2)
"git a rope." (c) others.
the larger and older the agglomeration of civilization and stuff, the creaker and more wasteful things get. for instance, the 1930s control system for the subways, much of which has yet to be modernized. with oceans rising and hurricanes becoming more destructive in coming years, nature will clear the decks.
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But yeah, there's really just no room in the city itself for big sprawling power plants. Or anything really. It's two islands and part of a third, so it's as big as it can possibly be.
Fortunately, it's a big-ass hunk of granite, so it's sturdy enough to support vertical growth. I don't think vertical NPP's would work, but there is an incredible amount of wind up there.