New York City is a big waste of energy.
A big waste of energy. Richard Cavalleri/Shutterstock

Back in 2009, the New Yorker's staff writer David Owen made some serious waves in urban theory with the key idea of his book Green Metropolis: Those who live in the city are greener than those who live in the suburbs or country. Indeed, the bigger the city, the greener its inhabitants.

The reasons were obvious: A New Yorker, for example, walked a good deal; shared lots of stuff, spaces, and infrastructure; and used public transportation frequently. As a consequence, the greenhouse gases generated by the average NYC inhabitant were only 30 percent of the national average. So, those who returned to nature were actually doing more damage to the environment than those who were staying away from it.

Few challenged this argument. The evidence was just too strong.

However, a recent paper, Energy and Material Flows of Megacities, published late last month in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, has not so much disagreed with Owen's findings as provided higher truths that place the Big Apple in a global setting. Yes, NYC might be more energy-efficient than an Atlanta, or a Houston, and certainly than a suburb like Issaquah, which has a poor walk score and citizens who can't live without a car, even for basic errands. But when NYC is compared with other megacities in other countries, its inhabitants begin to look like the suburbanites of the world's big cities.

The lead author of the paper, Chris Kennedy, says:

"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... When I saw that, I thought it was just incredible."

And when NYC is compared to a megacity in a poor nation:

The average New Yorker uses 24 times as much energy as a citizen of Kolkata, and produces over 15 times as much solid waste.

What this means is that New Yorkers are, after all, American—the kind of animal that wastes way too much and consumes way too much energy. With this study, we can finally see that just having an excellent public transportation system is not enough. What's also needed is a deeper transformation of the habits of the inhabitants, and the best means toward this end are aggressive social engineering and disincentives. London, for example, has made impressive green gains by making electricity expensive and taxing the disposal of solid wastes. The result? It is the only major city with a GDP that's going up as its use of electrical energy is going down. And it is a city...

...where the share of municipal solid waste landfilled in the United Kingdom... has fallen from 80 percent in 2001 to 49 percent in 2010.
(Note: NYC exports a bunch of its trash to the garbage state, South Carolina.)

What we must first break with is the popular ideology of the "man in the mirror." People are very slow when it comes to changing themselves (the man in the mirror) on their own. Change has to be imposed.

If you look at all of the green successes around the world—in Moscow, with heating; Tokyo, with leaking pipes; Seoul, with reclaiming and utilizing wastewater—they were made possible by smart urban planning, and not by individuals trying to change that person in the mirror.