[Music] hello and welcome to the suburban wasteland with me echo Gekko in this episode and the next we are covering the environmental consequences of massive urbanization ranging from carbon emissions to habitat destruction energy efficiency biodiversity and chemical pollution to get a real grasp on the environmental impact of the city in the suburb we first have to cover a brief modern history of urban life and the environment ironically the original development of modern suburbs in the 19th century was a pro health and pro-environment measure throughout history but especially during the Industrial Revolution cities were really filthy places living conditions declined enough that populations became visibly shorter in both the US and UK while pollution got so bad the English moths actually evolved from having light to very dark pigmentation over just a few decades to better hide in the soot code in industrial landscape a process known as industrial melanism so long as heavy industry was so heavily concentrated not to mention the untreated sewage and garbage from millions of people there was going to be a desire to suburban eyes into the cleaner greener and healthier areas outside of cities by the late 19th century English utopians were planning Garden City's on the outskirts of English industrial centres which were lower density peripheral towns was plenty of trees and greenery meant to provide residents with the benefits of urban life without the Dickensian conditions a few of these garden cities were actually built especially around London and their circular design remains an inspiration for many speculative city plans today given the relatively recent industrial legacy of u.s. cities many Americans to this day associate the city with a dirty dangerous atmosphere and the suburbs with idyllic pseudo rural pastoral life in the u.s. especially this narrative is tinged with more than a bit of racism given the large black populations in many American cities compared to the relatively segregated suburbs but the clean suburb and the polluting city are surprisingly also total myths from a purely environmental perspective nearly every metric suburbs are increasingly the most polluting and most unhealthy urban configuration out there let's talk about why that is in this first part we're tackling the elephant in the room carbon emissions in this first part we're tackling the single biggest issue carbon dioxide emissions surprisingly suburbs seem to be by far the worst offenders when it comes to greenhouse gases worse than both urban and rural areas one comprehensive study of New Jersey settlement patterns found that quote per capita carbon dioxide emissions vary widely following an inverted u-shape with post-war suburbs riding the pinnacle unquote when compared to population density now according to the EPA which surprisingly still has a greenhouse gases section on its website about 30 percent of u.s. emissions come from transportation another 30 percent come from electrical generation only 22 percent come from industrial activity and the rest come from agricultural and miscellaneous sources the emissions from transport are dominated by emissions from private automotive transport that is to say cars and as I discussed in my last video American suburbs make it impossible to walk bike take transit or really get around much at all without a car in fact one study found that over a quarter of all American car trips are less than a mile long and 41 percent of trips were less than 2 miles in length these are distances that are easily covered by foot or bicycle if you have the infrastructure for it in many newer suburbs the problem actually seems to be getting worse another study focusing on Montgomery County a large and growing suburban region to the north of Philadelphia found that between 1990 and 2003 total vehicle miles traveled and associated emissions increased twice as fast as the population so not only it were more people moving to car centric suburbia but its residents were driving even more than before you only have to look at the sprawling parking lots in front of suburban strip malls and office parks to realize just how entrenched car use is in American suburbs that study of New Jersey concluded that quote only exceptionally high densities coupled with transit access and walkable destinations yield dramatic reductions in per capita emissions unquote even if you get people to drive less with the car they of just having that car is pretty bad for the environment it turns out that producing a car creates as much carbon dioxide as driving it electric cars probably won't save us either even if they get their electricity from a green source an unlikely state given America's sluggish move away from fossil fuels just manufacturing the batteries could be more polluting than driving a gasoline car actually let's talk about those sprawling parking lots and developments the thing about cities is that by definition they pack a lot of people into a fairly small space compared to their suburban outgrowths this means that to house a given number of people in a suburb you need to chop down a lot more trees clear a lot more wetlands and generally build over a lot more wilderness than you would to put them in the city a 2012 study which looked at the u.s. east of the Mississippi found that between 1992 and 2001 all urban areas combined only grew by about 30 square kilometers while suburban sprawl grew by over 3,000 square kilometers and since plants grow by absorbing and storing carbon dioxide from the air bulldozing over them now only releases all the carbon those plants stored but prevents that land from absorbing carbon in the future in fact that 2012 study found that as ex urban land turned into suburbs it absorbed 152 fewer grams of co2 per square meter per year do some basic math and this comes out to about 150,000 kilograms of carbon per year per square kilometre just from reduced vegetation the study of montgomery county notes that quote development claimed almost 25% of the county's forest land over the last 15 years unquote while the new jersey study highlights that quote New Jersey's largest land use growth is in the urban category which also includes suburbs mostly at the expense of agricultural land forested land and wetlands unquote now some suburban nights might point out that suburbs must surely be environmentally friendly after all just look at all the greenery well this is only partially true first of all the suburbs might not actually have that much green covered compared to cities the 2012 study of American land east of the Mississippi used a satellite imagery to estimate coverage and type of greenery and found that by 2001 suburbs had a higher proportion of built of land and hence less greenery per area than urban areas so not only are suburbs quite bad at absorbing carbon dioxide in general but newer suburbs are actually getting worse at it maybe even worse than our cities after all cities aren't coded in massive parking lots at least anymore and some have even done a good job of rehabilitating nature within them everybody knows about Central Park in New York but parks like st. Paul's 26 mile long Mississippi River waterfront or Chicago's 19 mile long lakefront trail are even better examples fortunately most of our cities aren't as gray as Manhattan [Music] but this can still be a bit counterintuitive since anybody can hop on Google Maps and clearly see that for example Chicago proper is much more gray than the surrounding suburbs right this is true for the central business district but if we zoom into the residential neighborhoods in the city we can see that while buildings packed close together give the land a gray appearance from a distance up close there are actually a lot of trees many more than modern suburban streets additionally a 20-17 report by the nonprofit Trust for Public Land found that in most dense American cities between 10 and 20 percent of all land area was parkland this is a much higher proportion than low-density American cities which typically only have 3 to 7 percent of land set aside for parks furthermore most suburban green space is composed of lawns in fact across the entire US turf grass takes up 32 million acres larger than the state of Ohio according to a 2015 study this is three times larger than the space used for any other irrigated crop in America unfortunately compared to forests or wetland suburban lawns aren't very good at absorbing carbon that 2012 study notes that forest for example absorbs about 50 percent more carbon dioxide per square meter than grass lawns furthermore a regular lawn mowing generates a significant if relatively small amount of carbon dioxide estimated by one study to be about 14 grams of carbon per square meter per year while small this amount was large enough to quote eventually outweigh the carbon storage potential of turf grasses transforming home lawns from a carbon sink to a carbon source unquote oh and did I mention that Americans spent 40 billion dollars on lawn care a year as much as the US government's entire foreign aid budget that sounds efficient but so far we've missed the biggest issue within the biggest issue transportation is only 30 percent of u.s. emissions and deforestation is also relatively minor compared to the biggest consumer of energy climate control or the heating and cooling of buildings I couldn't find any specific American numbers but one study of Australia suggests that quote heating and cooling presently accounts for forty point seven percent of national energy consumption unquote the u.s. is more temperate but twelve percent of emissions are generated directly by residential and commercial use while nearly half of home electricity is used for heating or cooling in a nation where the large majority of electricity is still generated by burning fossil fuels heating and cooling buildings seems to be the source of the plurality of our emissions with suburbs being a major contributor as one American study puts it quote large units and lower density areas eg single-family detached units that are also the most popular type create the most emissions in both their construction and operation unquote single houses are really inefficient at keeping heat in or out as infrared images of these homes clearly show and has been getting worse as we've been building McMansions and other monstrosity x' in our suburbs one study in los angeles found that since 1990 quote a large fraction of the energy savings that would have been expected from recent residential energy efficiency improvements were likely lost as a result of parallel growth in the sheer size of new homes unquote homes have grown so massive that no amount of advances in efficiency or insulation have actually cut down on their total energy use in contrast urban units tend to be much smaller both because of physical space constraints and also because cities are filled with public amenities so city dwellers don't need massive backyards or multiple fridges or pantries or triple garages when they have plenty of parks and groceries and transit options within walking distance in addition homes and urban settings are often a part of large buildings like apartment blocks and so each unit is only exposed to the Sun wind on one or two sites instead of all four like what's a detached home to put it somewhat technically building volume is a cubic function while building surface area is a square function so as a building gets larger the volume grows faster than the outside surface exposed to the climate therefore bigger buildings generally need less energy per cubic foot of internal space to heat or cool them since Heat are cold have a harder time escaping or getting in the US Energy Information Administration has consistently shown that single-family detached units use up to twice as much energy per household compared to multi-unit buildings though as far as I can tell these numbers don't control for demographics in fact urban dwellers across the board emit much less co2 than their suburban counterparts a 2010 study which compared total household carbon emissions between cities and suburbs and dozens of American metropolitan areas found that in all but two cities urbanites spew out less in some cases much less carbon dioxide than their suburban neighbors New York saw the biggest difference with over six tons less of carbon dioxide per household per year in general city livers produced several tons less in suburban folks in the same region the two exceptions Los Angeles and Detroit actually proved the rule both are infamously low-density cities whose neighborhoods look more like suburbs than an urban core now to be fair some studies have found that urban residents generate more co2 than suburban people such as this study from Finland which found that per capita emissions rise by some 20% in central Helsinki when accounting for consumption or the emissions generated to produce what we buy however in all these cases the author's actually find that this is due to greater wealth in urban downtown's quote the differences in the carbon consumption between the two areas are according to the model used mainly due to the higher standard of living and consequent higher consumption in the downtown area unquote control for income and cities once again become the superior choice in fact that 2010 study did control for income along with family size and still found that cities outperform their suburbs almost across the board the results can best be seen in this visualization based on data from a 2013 paper which calculated average per capita emissions by zip code across the entire United States I've linked to an interactive version in a description but the most obvious lesson is apparent from even a quick glance let's look at some major metropolitan areas in all these cases and missions are low in the city proper and explode in the suburbs before gradually fading down in the countryside the lesson here is that city and country have to unite to overthrow their suburban oppressors and establish a green urbanist utopia with agricultural elements as described by Murray Bookchin and his masterful synthesis of unfortunately the Australia study noted that quote new developments of large homes on the urban fringe account for a significant portion of new bills unquote something familiar to any American and while it's tempting to say that simply making our cars electric and making electricity green would solve nearly all the problems covered here today the experts aren't so sure a 2007 study looking at Switzerland concluded that ambitious climate goals could likely only be achieved through reductions in energy consumption rather than just changing where we get our energy in the first place gasoline or carbon taxes may not be enough either while they may convince people to urbanize in the long run and the short run people are often held down by their jobs and their families in a moment where the poor are increasingly being priced out of cities and forced into the suburbs such policies and isolation could be terribly regressive there are sources of hope and positive change however models that I will cover in the second video on this topic along with discussion of a host of non carbon environmental suburban concerns just remember we're not doomed yet [Music] [Applause] [Music]