How Green are Cities? Not as green as their proponents present them to be:
I get the point but I don’t quite buy this. Manhattan sells services, most notably finance and entertainment, to the rest of America, and in turns draws upon industrial outputs, which of course include steel and glass. It is also no accident that Gary, Indiana is near Chicago and those rather aesthetically thrilling factories off the New Jersey Turnpike are right outside New York City. Try the other boroughs as well, they don’t call Staten Island a big garbage dump for nothing. Praising Manhattan is a bit like looking only at the roof of a car and concluding it doesn’t burn much gas. Manhattan supports its density only by being surrounded by a broader load of crud. [...] Think of Manhattan as a place which outsources its pollution, simply because land there is so valuable.