The Most Sustainable City In America

every couple months I run across an article like this one that ranks the most environmentally friendly cities in the United States for this one that somehow ranked Houston as the most sustainable city in America and I've always wondered how they come up with these rankings I assume there was some kind of formal Awards or measures for this kind of thing but but when I looked into it I realized that they're basically just made up scorecards by writers and companies and that got me thinking what if I made up a list of the most sustainable cities in America what would I learn what would I choose to measure and which city would ultimately win so over the last few weeks I interviewed sustainability experts all around the world crunched a bunch of numbers and asked all of you for submissions ranking the most sustainable cities in the country in this video I'll share what I learned and which city won my very prestigious and official most sustainable city in America award first let's talk about pledges and plans [Music] in the last few years hundreds of cities around the world have announced climate action plans and sustainability goals over that same period hundreds of cities have also announced goals of getting 100 of their electricity from renewable energy this is all awesome and it's a sign of some really important progress but from my perspective plans and pledges should be table Stakes at this point so if a city didn't have one of these things it didn't qualify for my very prestigious award I was much more interested in what cities are currently doing or even better what they've already done to become sustainable so with that said the first two things that I looked at were how cities were making their buildings and transportation systems more sustainable for many cities the building sector and the transportation sectors are the source of their largest greenhouse gas emissions one reason that I wanted to look at these sectors is the fact that cities actually have a lot of control over them with buildings we have permitting Authority and we have zoning and we have building codes those are things that we could use to manage buildings Transportation obviously in most cities own their roads and control their roads so they can you know shape their transportation system cities can either pass laws that make their transportation systems and buildings more sustainable or not and those laws can have a huge impact so to build my initial list of cities I looked at a few things first I looked at how many people ride public transit a good public transit system can get people out of their cars and reduce CO2 emissions and air pollution but there's another reason that public transit is so important even if we change over all our internal combustion engine cars to electric vehicles we're still going to have 50 air quality problems because 50 of the air quality problems come from the brake pads the tires not from the engine still have all the congestion problems which lead to all the wasted time right so here are the 10 cities where people ride public transit the most there were definitely a few surprises on this list for me like Ames Iowa home to Iowa State University and apparently a pretty great public transit system I also looked at what cities have a lot of bike commuters if you want to learn more about why bike infrastructure makes for such great cities I'd recommend checking out my recent video on how the Netherlands built a biking Utopia again there were a few surprises on this list for me like Key West Florida and Aspen Colorado I guess the world's globally Elite really love their bikes shortly after finding these two lists I found an index of the best car free cities this index combined Transit ridership the share of bike and walk commuters and the number of people that don't have a car I felt like this index was a good measure of a city's entire transportation system so I added the top five cities in both the big and small City category to my initial list the next thing that I looked at was density in general denser cities tend to be more sustainable they require less land per capita which results in less habitat loss nearby people don't need to drive as much and residents tend to have smaller homes which means less energy used for things like Heating and Cooling unsurprisingly cities like New York and Boston tend to score highly on this metric but in looking at the built environment I wanted to look at more than just density after all a city could be dense but Power all of its buildings on dirty fossil fuels or it could be dense but not encourage things like Energy Efficiency so I thought I'd look at which cities have the least carbon emissions coming from their buildings but this is where I ran into a bit of a problem the cities with the least building emissions were almost all in California and that makes sense cities like LA and San Francisco are in moderate climates that means that they don't have to use that much energy for things like Heating and Cooling and I didn't think it was fair to measure a city based on what climate zone it's in so I came up with a different approach but we'll come back to that later thank you something else that came up in a lot of my interviews was the amount of green space that a city has I think a sustainable city is one that is is filled with green spaces and not just one large green space in the middle but really decentralized or dispersed green spaces that can be accessed by everyone and within a short distance in addition to being lovely spaces to spend time green spaces are a really useful climate adaptation tool as our cities get hotter Parks can act like a natural air conditioner that brings the temperature down here are the 10 cities with the most Green Space today again there are a few surprises for me on this list like Las Vegas once again we'll add the top five cities in this list to our leaderboard of course green spaces are just one aspect of climate adaptation in order to adapt to climate change cities will need to do a lot more than just add parks and other green spaces some will need to build sea walls While others will need to build heat shelters but measuring a city's climate adaptation plans and progress is a little bit harder than measuring how many people ride public transit so for this one I relied on the recommendations from the experts that I interviewed New York Chicago and Phoenix all came up as cities leading the way in climate adaptation in Phoenix for example the city's experimenting with something called cool Pavements to adapt to Rising temperatures basically putting a reflective surface on the on the pavement right so if you you make it a lighter color it's going to reflect more sunlight rather than absorbing it and then becoming a kind of heat Source Phoenix has already coated about 100 kilometers of their streets with these cool Pavements and in the places that they have temperatures are already 10 degrees cooler than in other parts of the city something else that came up a lot in my interviews was the importance of environmental justice and Equity things like air pollution flooding and heat waves don't affect everybody in the same way the impacts of climate change are unjust they are you know hitting the poorest the most vulnerable this is another aspect of a city's sustainability that's hard to measure but a few cities came up a lot in my interviews those were New York La Baltimore Atlanta and Chicago so we'll add those to our list as well as well and finally because I'm a man of the people I wanted to add submissions from you the audience last week I put out a tweet and a community post here on YouTube asking for your recommendations on the most sustainable cities in America you recommended Denver in particular for their plan to phase out fossil fuels and buildings Santa Monica for their bike Lanes Victoria and Vancouver British Columbia for their wait those aren't U.S cities wrong Oakland for their climate Justice plan and somebody recommended Salt Lake City for their fantastic mayor at this point I had 23 cities but 23 is a bit of a weird number unless you like Michael Jordan [Music] so I decided to round out the list by adding two more cities I added Boulder Colorado which has some of the best bike infrastructure in the country a great natural climate Solutions team and waste program and most importantly because I live here and I added Burlington Vermont which already runs on 100 renewable electricity and has a surprising number of solar panels for how far north it is and also my wife went to college there so with that we had a top 25 list which sounds a lot better than our top 23 list unless again you like Michael Jordan [Music] now the question was how to find a winner from here earlier I mentioned that buildings are one of the largest sources of air pollution and carbon emissions in most cities over the last few years many cities around the country have passed laws that will ban fossil fuels and newly built homes the reality is that there's no way that a city can get to net zero emissions without this kind of policy so I limited any City that hasn't yet passed a law prohibiting fossil fuels and new construction this eliminated just over half the cities on my list including unfortunately my city of Boulder and with this I had a top 12 most sustainable cities in America list which is a bit of a weird number unless you like Tom Brady [Music] and more importantly I promise the most sustainable city in America not the 12 most sustainable cities so I needed to filter my list down further [Music] the next thing that I looked at was whether or not these cities had a composting program every day Americans throw away about a third of their food and while the best thing that we can do is reduce food waste second best thing we can do is compost unfortunately most cities in America don't have composting programs so I expected this to narrow our list but 10 out of 12 cities left on my list did have a composting program the only cities that didn't were Ithaca New York and Salt Lake City so I removed those from my list and now I had a top 10 list in order to find my winner I decided to analyze each City's consumption-based carbon emissions per capita which is really a mouthful this metric looks at the carbon emissions from all the goods and services that an average person consumes in a city it includes the energy they use in their home the fuel they use for transportation the food that they eat and the products that they buy to find this data I use a tool called cool climate Berkeley which I'll leave a link to in the description below but before revealing the final results I want to quickly explain what this number doesn't capture climate change is one of the biggest environmental problems of our time but it's not the only one sustainability is about so much more than just carbon emissions it's also about how we adapt to climate change it's about racial and economic Justice it's about water use and biodiversity and so much more I realized over the course of making this video that choosing just one winner is really a Fool's errand but I promised I would so let's take a look at how each of these cities compare and the winner of my very prestigious most sustainable city in America Ward is New York City [Applause] as we saw earlier New York has the highest transit ridership in the country it's also one of the easiest places to live without a car as a result the city has low Transportation emissions per capita and if you've ever lived in New York you know that most homes in the city are pretty small and as a result homes don't use that much energy on top of that New York has some of the lowest carbon electricity in the country the main reason for this is that 33 of the electricity comes from nuclear while another 22 percent comes from Hydro nuclear and hydro also happen to be two of the most controversial forms of carbon-free electricity so be sure to let me know your thoughts on those in the comments below but all of that just describes New York today most of the people that I interviewed for this story agreed that New York has one of the best plans to address climate over the coming decades in 2021 New York passed a law Banning fossil fuels in new homes they're also planning to spend hundreds of millions of dollars on adaptation projects over the coming years and they have one of the most respected climate Justice plans in the country but none of that's to say that sustainability has to look like high-rise apartments and Subway systems as we saw earlier there are plenty of small cities Across America that are phasing out fossil fuels and encouraging things like Transit use and they're in States ranging from California to Iowa to Pennsylvania the last thing I want to say is that every city in America including the ones on this list have a lot of work to do you could argue that there aren't any sustainable cities in America today given our high levels of consumption and waste but that's a topic for another video so with that thanks for watching and I'll see you next week

Channel: Distilled

Views: 189,823

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Id: Qa7TOqbS614

Length: 11min 37sec (697 seconds)

Published: Thu Mar 23 2023