True, but the environmental impact of NYers (like most city-dwellers) is far far lower than most areas of the country. Lawns and cars drink liquids by the gallon.
Pollution: City vs Rural area
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True, but the environmental impact of NYers (like most city-dwellers) is far far lower than most areas of the country. Lawns and cars drink liquids by the gallon.
NudeDiver
Contributor
...and as we know, everyone who doesn't live in NY or a city has a big ass lawn and drives a car all the time....
I've never understood this argument. Whether you feel better because of some chemical interaction, or you feel better because you brain tells you that you should feel better - what difference does it make? At the end of the day - you feel better. Isn't that the point of a palliative?
Dtaine
Contributor
Urban Myths | Conservation Magazine
" When most of us think about environmentally friendly places, we imagine rural landscapes and bucolic open spaces, a terrain untouched by concrete. Cities, in contrast, seem like ecological nightmares. They are polluted, artificial environments where nature consists of cockroaches, pigeons, and florist shops.
But according to Bettencourt and West, the conventional wisdom is exactly backward. Cities are bastions of environmentalism. People who live in densely populated places lead environmentally friendly lives. They consume fewer resources per person and take up less space. (On average, city dwellers use about half as much electircty as people living outside the city limits.) And because efficiency scales with the size of the population, big cities are always more efficient than small cities. An environmentally friendly place is simply one with lots and lots of people. While rural towns might look greenÍÂll those lawns and trees are reassuringÍÕheir per-capita rates of consumption and pollution are significantly higher. "
Note that they considered gas consumption as well, not just electricity.
The same phenomenon almost certainly drives this effect for DC vs. states (since 'states' other than DC have cities averaged in with suburbs and rural areas, whereas DC only has urban areas within its confines):
DCist: D.C. Uses Less Gas Per Capita Than All States
NudeDiver
Contributor
But you're assuming that the people in rural areas are using gas an electricity. That's hardly true. If you're REALLY rural, and not just faking it, you're not using gas, electricity, or running water. I know - I lived in such a place during my last year of undergraduate studies.
EvenKeel
Registered
Depends on how you define rural, doesn't it? Where did you spend your last year of undergraduate studies?
NudeDiver
Contributor
EvenKeel
Registered
Ah. I'm a city boy so wine country is about a rural as I get. Even areas considered rural in the lower 48 have utilities. When I go somewhere that doesn't have electricity and gas, I call it "camping."
Disclaimer: Please note that the above statement is made without any sort of bravado. It's a simple statment of fact.
Then the statistics should underestimate the adverse environmental impact of rural dwellers. There are plenty of papers on particulate matter pollution in rural areas due to wood-burning stoves, for instance. Since the PNAS paper considers only things that appear on meters and still finds that urban areas are more efficient (without counting the off-the-books sources of pollution you're suggesting), the true difference will be even greater.
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