Seize the Hamptons
We should all get the chance to escape the city and enjoy leisure — without the hefty ecological footprint.
Central Park was once the greenest piece of Manhattan. Now environmentalists and politicians trumpet the city’s towers and subway tunnels, emblems of an energy-efficient density, as the island’s greenest assets. With global warming threatening to kill millions a year, and inter-state negotiations stalled, pro-density planning is an increasingly vogue strategy for cutting carbon emissions.
The basic idea is sound. Cluster home, work, and services and you reduce car traffic and improve daily life. Assemble people in large buildings and they’ll use energy more efficiently. Everyone is jumping on board — from big think tanks and international institutes to progressive planners and politicians. Make the suburbs more like Manhattan — or at least Brooklyn — they shout, and we’ll get more livable cities that also mitigate global warming.
The Density Fetish
If the story seems a touch too neat, and a touch too easy on rich New Yorkers, that’s because it is. Density as such really is associated with lower carbon emissions. But as a recent round of peer-reviewed studies shows, including consumption’s global carbon footprint and controlling for class and lifestyle make all the difference. When the people clustered are prosperous professionals, the carbon benefits of density can be cancelled out by the emissions their consumption causes. The smokestacks, of course, are elsewhere.
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