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Heating an apartment takes far less energy than heating a detached house. Public transit takes far less energy than driving a car. Walking or biking takes even

Heating an apartment takes far less energy than heating a detached house. Public transit takes far less energy than driving a car. Walking or biking takes even less. There's no way that urban living isn't far more climate friendly than rural, even if the rural housing is getting some energy from solar or burning wood.

autoexec 4y ago
The greater the number of people in a given area the worse it will be for that environment. Honestly, I even think detached houses beat most apartments. Apartments often depend on electric baseboard radiators and window AC units for heating and cooling. They often have multiple massive hot water heaters where the people on higher floors must leave their water running for 10-15 minutes before they start getting hot water. They also tend to have outdated appliances that are less energy efficient like electric ranges, and old refrigerators and ancient clothes washers/dryers. In most of the apartments I've lived in, it was firmly against the rules to hang your clothes on a line to be dried by wind and sun. The appliances you get are often not as well maintained either. Tenants aren't pulling out the fridge to clean the coils and landlords rarely do either. Renters don't have the ability to make the kinds of improvements that would reduce their energy bills and landlords are incentivized to cut corners on construction and maintenance since it saves them money and the expensive utility payments are the renter's problem (a problem they can't even know about until after they've signed a lease and gotten their electric bill). Public transportation is better than driving cars, but most people don't use public transpiration anyway and the number of cars on the road in dense urban settings is much higher than on rural streets. We can see that reflected in the air quality, which is abysmal in highly populated urban centers compared to rural areas. Urban environments have fewer trees, fewer unpaved expanses of land, more pollution (air, water, light, noise), less wildlife (greater habitat destruction, more poisons and other dangers to animals) and more trash/litter. Urban settings are by far less climate friendly than rural settings, but certainly we'd have new problems if everyone lived 2 miles from their nearest neighbor. There's a middle ground that I don't think we've really reached yet but for now it's probably a good thing that we have masses of people concentrated into small tightly packed highly polluted pockets of filth and disease and also wide open spaces where it's clean and quiet, where animals can live, and the air is cleaner. We'd be smart to try to increase the efficiency of the spaces we move into while still avoiding going over the number of humans a given area can sustainably support, but I have a feeling that there will always be people who want to live farther way from anything else than is practical and people who want to live in areas that are too densely populated to be good for the environment.
- TheCoelacanth 4y ago
  That's nonsense. You don't get less environmental impact by having every person take up more land. Urban living is much more environmentally friendly because the alternative is paving over more of the environment. The incentive to make improvements comes from ownership model, not form factor. Apartments can be owned and houses can be rented.
  - autoexec 4y ago
    > You don't get less environmental impact by having every person take up more land. Urban living is much more environmentally friendly because the alternative is paving over more of the environment. It's not about how much land a person uses, it's how that land is being used. Nobody sitting on a 5 or 6 acre lot in the middle of hickville is going to build one house and pave the rest with asphalt. Urban living is "paving over more of the environment" and you can see that with just minutes spent with Google maps looking at satellite views of urban vs rural areas. Rural areas are filled with grasslands and trees (and farms) while urban areas are vast expanses of concrete and asphalt with tiny islands of grass and trees. People in rural areas take up more land while at the same time using (and abusing) far less of it. Having largely unspoiled nature around you is a big part of the appeal to rural living, or so I'm told, I actually prefer living in cities.
    - TheCoelacanth 4y ago
      I'm not debating that one acre of urban land is worse for the environment than one acre of rural land, but that's not a realistic tradeoff. You need hundreds or thousands of times as much land to house people in a rural setting than in an urban setting. Rural people don't pave over all of the land that they have, but they certainly pave over more of it than each person's share of paved over land in an urban setting. If all the people in the entirety of Idaho, Montana, Wyoming, North Dakota, South Dakota, Nebraska, and the western half of Minnesota lived at the density of NYC, more than half a million square miles or more than 99.9% of the entire land area in those states would be completely untouched wilderness[1]. If you think that all human habitation in Idaho, Montana, Wyoming, North Dakota, South Dakota, Nebraska, and the western half of Minnesota combined has a smaller impact on the environment than 469 square miles of NYC, then you are clearly delusional. [1] https://www.slate.com/articles/life/culturebox/2014/10/population_map_use_our_interactive_map_to_figure_out_how_many_flyover_states.html https://www.slate.com/articles/life/culturebox/2014/10/popul...

autoexec 4y ago

The greater the number of people in a given area the worse it will be for that environment. Honestly, I even think detached houses beat most apartments. Apartments often depend on electric baseboard radiators and window AC units for heating and cooling. They often have multiple massive hot water heaters where the people on higher floors must leave their water running for 10-15 minutes before they start getting hot water. They also tend to have outdated appliances that are less energy efficient like electric ranges, and old refrigerators and ancient clothes washers/dryers. In most of the apartments I've lived in, it was firmly against the rules to hang your clothes on a line to be dried by wind and sun. The appliances you get are often not as well maintained either. Tenants aren't pulling out the fridge to clean the coils and landlords rarely do either. Renters don't have the ability to make the kinds of improvements that would reduce their energy bills and landlords are incentivized to cut corners on construction and maintenance since it saves them money and the expensive utility payments are the renter's problem (a problem they can't even know about until after they've signed a lease and gotten their electric bill). Public transportation is better than driving cars, but most people don't use public transpiration anyway and the number of cars on the road in dense urban settings is much higher than on rural streets. We can see that reflected in the air quality, which is abysmal in highly populated urban centers compared to rural areas. Urban environments have fewer trees, fewer unpaved expanses of land, more pollution (air, water, light, noise), less wildlife (greater habitat destruction, more poisons and other dangers to animals) and more trash/litter. Urban settings are by far less climate friendly than rural settings, but certainly we'd have new problems if everyone lived 2 miles from their nearest neighbor. There's a middle ground that I don't think we've really reached yet but for now it's probably a good thing that we have masses of people concentrated into small tightly packed highly polluted pockets of filth and disease and also wide open spaces where it's clean and quiet, where animals can live, and the air is cleaner. We'd be smart to try to increase the efficiency of the spaces we move into while still avoiding going over the number of humans a given area can sustainably support, but I have a feeling that there will always be people who want to live farther way from anything else than is practical and people who want to live in areas that are too densely populated to be good for the environment.

TheCoelacanth 4y ago
That's nonsense. You don't get less environmental impact by having every person take up more land. Urban living is much more environmentally friendly because the alternative is paving over more of the environment. The incentive to make improvements comes from ownership model, not form factor. Apartments can be owned and houses can be rented.
- autoexec 4y ago
  > You don't get less environmental impact by having every person take up more land. Urban living is much more environmentally friendly because the alternative is paving over more of the environment. It's not about how much land a person uses, it's how that land is being used. Nobody sitting on a 5 or 6 acre lot in the middle of hickville is going to build one house and pave the rest with asphalt. Urban living is "paving over more of the environment" and you can see that with just minutes spent with Google maps looking at satellite views of urban vs rural areas. Rural areas are filled with grasslands and trees (and farms) while urban areas are vast expanses of concrete and asphalt with tiny islands of grass and trees. People in rural areas take up more land while at the same time using (and abusing) far less of it. Having largely unspoiled nature around you is a big part of the appeal to rural living, or so I'm told, I actually prefer living in cities.
  - TheCoelacanth 4y ago
    I'm not debating that one acre of urban land is worse for the environment than one acre of rural land, but that's not a realistic tradeoff. You need hundreds or thousands of times as much land to house people in a rural setting than in an urban setting. Rural people don't pave over all of the land that they have, but they certainly pave over more of it than each person's share of paved over land in an urban setting. If all the people in the entirety of Idaho, Montana, Wyoming, North Dakota, South Dakota, Nebraska, and the western half of Minnesota lived at the density of NYC, more than half a million square miles or more than 99.9% of the entire land area in those states would be completely untouched wilderness[1]. If you think that all human habitation in Idaho, Montana, Wyoming, North Dakota, South Dakota, Nebraska, and the western half of Minnesota combined has a smaller impact on the environment than 469 square miles of NYC, then you are clearly delusional. [1] https://www.slate.com/articles/life/culturebox/2014/10/population_map_use_our_interactive_map_to_figure_out_how_many_flyover_states.html https://www.slate.com/articles/life/culturebox/2014/10/popul...