The average New Yorker uses around 30% as much energy as a suburbanite, so the single most environmentally-friendly thing anyone in the USA can do is move to a dense city like New York and take public transit instead of private cars.
As New Yorkers, it’s our job to welcome new comers so they, too, can adopt our environmentally-friendly lifestyles.
This requires the “densification” of New York City, which we can encourage by up-zoning neighborhoods and investing in the transit infrastructure necessary to support a growing population.
We should also be coordinating infrastructure investments and development policies with municipalities throughout the New York Metropolitan Area. Cities with along rail infrastructure that lead to NYC’s main transit hubs should have vibrant downtown’s with significant housing stock within walking distance of the train station. My proposed Regional Coordination Initiative will organize to achieve these goals.
Creating a denser New York City with more robust mass transit infrastructure is infinitely more environmentally friendly than the theatrical environmentalism popular among New York City’s political class.
Calling Out Performative Environmentalism
One of the least environmentally friendly things we can do is ban plastic bags, which, it turns out, is bad for the environment.
If you’re worried about the climate-change causing CO2 of plastic bags, don’t be. A Danish study shows that one “eco” cotton shopping bag take 10,000 times more energy to produce than a single plastic bag. That means you’d have to use a cotton bag everyday for over 20 years before it saves any CO2 from entering the atmosphere.
If you’re worried about plastic pollution in the ocean, don’t blame NYC’s plastic bags. Over 90% of ocean plastics come from 10 rivers in Asia and Africa where people don’t have modern sanitation systems.
The plastic bag ban is the type of performative environmentalism that makes people feel good and results in even more pollution and waste. Don’t be conned. Let’s make a dense, awesome city with abundant housing so more people can live here, use less energy and take up less land that could be used for more environmentally friendly purposes.
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