David Owen
Green Metropolis
Why Living Smaller, Living Closer, and Driving Less are the Keys to Sustainability.
Riverhead Books (Penguin)
David Owen, a writer for the New Yorker, started his married life in Manhattan. Then he moved to exurbia. He's noticed how much his neighbors talk about being green and reducing their carbon footprint.
Then he looked at the figures -- always a dangerous habit. New York City has a much lower per capita carbon footprint than any state in the USA. Indeed, the state with the lowest per capita carbon footprint is New York State, and the reason is the presence there of New York City.
If Owen's Connecticut neighbors produce so much more CO2 while consciously trying to reduce their carbon footprint, and New Yorkers produce so much less while not caring about it, what does Owen see as the major causes of Global Warming?
That after the jump.
Owen sees four -- interrelated -- major villains:
1) The automobile,
2) The distributed residences that the automobile makes paossible,
3) Zoning rules which separate residential from commercial from industrial property, and
4) American acquisitiveness.
He points out that his old Manhattan lifestyle produced a low carbon footprint -- quite accidentally, before the words "carbon footprint" were even used together -- for two major reasons:
1) Driving in Manhattan is aggravating.
2) A huge number of desirable destinations were close.
Low carbon footprint isn't the way that most people think about New York; it isn't even the way that most New Yorkers think about New York. Indeed, Owen quotes a NYC study exclaiming with horror that NYC alone produces almost one percent of the greenhouse gas emissions of the entire USA. Newspapers often quoted that statistic, usually ignoring that NYC holds 2.7% of the country's population.
In this report , the mayor pointed out that buildings produce 79% of NYC's CO2, while the average for the country is 32%. Owen points out that this means that New York buildings produce (slightly) less CO2 per capita than the US average. It's only such a great percentage because New Yorkers don't produce so much CO2 by driving.
To the two reasons above, Owen adds a third:
3) Walking in Manhattan is pleasant.
He relates how he and his neighbors drive the same distances that New Yorkers habitually walk. New York streets are interesting, and exurban streets are dull. (Suburban streets are much duller; he lives in a charming old New England town.) He recounts how he carried his 1YO daughter in a backpack through Manhattan, planning how he'd take her for other excursions to see the trees turn when they moved to the house they'd already selected. His daughter would have none of that; she began fretting as soon as he took her outdoors on their first walk in the countryside.
And, of course, when the distances are beyond their capacity to walk, New Yorkers have public transit available. But, Owen points out citing various studies, public transit is only efficient where population is dense. People will only take buses -- however low their fares -- when the buses go where they want to go when they want to go there. And frequent buses on closely-packed routes only make sense when there is heavy traffic. (Right now, and over some period of the past, Chicago is slowly destroying its public transit system by cutting down on service. This leads to fewer riders, which leads to less frequent service, and so on until the inevitable end. This isn't in the book; it's my experience.)
But public transit not only depends on dense population; it encourages it. People see advantages to living where they can get the subway. Studies comparing different cities find that one mile more of public transit travel correlates with four miles less of car travel. On the opposite side, automobile travel encourages suburban sprawl into previously-rural areas. For one thing, you can; for another, the family furthest out escapes the pollution and congestion generated by the families moving further out.
But Owen points out that the widely-spaced single-family home in a solely-residential neighborhood generates a great deal more waste and pollution than that produced by the driving of the family members. Government and utility services have to be provided; deliveries have to be made. He claims that a FedEx truck in his neighborhood has to drive dozens of miles to make as many deliveries as a FedEx truck makes while parked (or double parked) outside a large Manhattan apartment building. No amount of insulation of a house sitting naked on a lot can stop it from leaking more heat than an apartment with neighbors above, below, and on each side. If the garbage truck has to drive half a mile to service seven houses, does each of them having a compost heap in the back yard make the combination more environmentally efficient than my seven-unit building?
A great deal of the cost of electricity is delivering it -- which is reflected in the rates' charging for connection; the rates don't charge more for connection, though, in a sprawling suburb than they charge in a compact city block. So, the urbanite whose usage is -- on average -- lower than the suburbanite, subsidizes the connection of the suburbanite with his connection charge.
Owen praises Jane Jacobs, whose writings on Great American Cities preceded the worries (among non-scientists) about global warming, for pointing out advantages of large cities which are also carbon-footprint advantages. One is the advantage of mixed use. When common stores are close to where people live, they shop and drop off their dry cleaning without getting in cars. When uncommon stores are mixed into residential neighborhoods, the traffic to some stores from some residences balances the traffic to other stores from other residences. Buses going both ways have the same utilization, which carries more people per gallon burnt. While some industrial uses might be unpleasant neighbors -- and those are usually too large to fit into residential neighborhoods, anyway -- the separation of office buildings and stores from residences is at one and the same time the first principle of zoning laws and totally irrational.
Not only are the empty sidewalks at different hours of the day a double expense to maintain, they are an invitation to crime.
Acquisitiveness, while it has obvious connections to automobiles and ever-larger houses, is really a separate problem, and Owen doesn't deal with it much more than acknowledging it. (Owen isn't a pleader; he's an analyst. He writes as much about what New York does wrong as about what it does right.) He does seem to suggest that people would accumulate less if they lived in tighter quarters, but whether they would buy less or simply throw things away sooner, he doesn't say.
When I wrote a previous diary about a review of this work, I got three responses. Pardon me if I say that they sounded a lot like: "This conflicts with my prejudices; so it must be wrong." The issues raised were:
1) But New York imports lots of food from the agricultural belt.
Owen acknowledges that. The carbon footprint attributed to New Yorkers should include the carbon footprint of their share of American agriculture. But they are not special in that. Other cities and all suburbs import their food -- localvore discussion tomorrow. New Yorkers' living is much better for the environment than suburban living, but not as much better as the raw figures suggest. Even so, it's ridiculous to dismiss the advantages shown in the figures.
You can't say that Manhattanites should be charged the carbon footprint of the food they eat but people in Winnetka shouldn't
2) How about the huge New York reservoirs?
Owen reports that long-lasting resentment more than answering it directly. When the reservoirs were built, the issue was raised and was a better argument than it is today. Then, most towns took their drinking water from the streams flowing past, and most farmers took theirs from their own wells. New York's reservoirs were among the first, and were necessitated because the concentration of people left the nearby water badly polluted.
Today, almost everybody drinks water from reservoirs. If New York was broken up into a thousand small towns, each of those towns would have its own reserboir. And per capita New York consumes less water than is typical. (This isn't strange; about a third of human-potable water in the USA is used to water lawns. New Yorkers don't do that.)
3) New York's carbon footprint should include the carbon footprint of those who commute into the city.
Owen doesn't foresee this objection. This might be because the objection is irrational.
a) Owen is writing about a lifestyle. He contrasts the urban -- energy efficient -- lifestyle with the suburban -- energy inefficient -- lifestyle. Indeed, he regards Manhattan residence as the epitome of this efficient lifestyle. Why does the fact that people commute into New York, many of them into Manhattan, argue against that lifestyle?
b) The issue Owen raises is really a fraction. The carbon footprint is the numerator; the population is the denominator. Commuters into the city contribute to the numerator during the day. Which means that Owen's figures overstates the carbon footprint of those who live in the city. Why should commuters' after-work activities be added to the numerator without their numbers being added to the denominator?
c) Actually Owen reports that New York State has the lowest per capita carbon footprint of any state. Which would imply that the waste of New York City commuters -- many of whom, though by no means all, live in the state -- aren't wasteful enough to overcome the urbanites' advantage.
d) In general, the residents of the city provide their own services and those of the commuters, too. Except financially, they are not dependent on the commuters. It's not as if the urbanites got a low carbon footprint by shifting their CO2-producing needs (except agriculture, mentioned above) onto others in any special degree.
This reports how Owen sees the problem, and I find him quite persuasive. Tomorrow, his take on several feel-good solutions. Why they don't work.