Speaking of Sharkansky
There’s a really moronic post over at Sharkansky’s Sound Politics blog right now that criticizes Mayor Nickels’s Kyoto initiative. (Nickels has been lining up U.S. cities to honor the Kyoto Protocols despite Bush’s objections to the international treaty.)
Sharkansky’s colleague Matt Rosenberg writes: “Anyone who really believes global warming is a problem - like Nickels - ought to get that their huge populations and growing industrial sectors will more than offset any gains we make in Puget Sound in reducing greenhouse gas emissions.”
WRONG. Despite the conventional wisdom that cities kill the environment, cities are actually good for the environment.
As I wrote in our Urban Archipelago essay last year: “As counterintuitive as it may seem to composting, recycling self-righteous suburbanites, living in dense urban areas is actually better for the environment. The population of New York City is larger than that of 39 states. But because dense apartment housing is more energy efficient, New York City uses less energy than any state. Conversely, suburban living—with its cars, highways, and single-family houses flanked by pesticide-soaked lawns—saps energy and devastates the ecosystem.”
I got this from a must-read New Yorker article (“Green Manhattan,” October 18, 2004, by David Owen).
Oh, and cities are also good for the environment because they have mass transit. On that score, yes, Mayor Gridlock has proven to be a problem.
Sigh. The one time the Shark discusses something outside of Republicans getting jobbed in an election, and he puts his foot in his mouth with utterly ridiculous commentary.
Also, the alternative is to spread the industry across rural America, and actually accelerate global warming by spewing greenhouse gases into more locations and a wider span of airspace.