Justin Fox, Columnist

Cities Are Good for the Environment, But Many City Dwellers Aren’t

A single transatlantic flight can cancel out all your bike-commuting.

July 23, 2019 at 1:30 PM UTC

Justin Fox is a Bloomberg Opinion columnist covering business, economics and other topics involving charts. A former editorial director of the Harvard Business Review, he is author of “The Myth of the Rational Market.”

Gazing down on people with smaller carbon footprints.
Photographer: Timothy A. Clary/AFP/Getty Images

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Dense, transit-oriented development is more environmentally friendly than suburban sprawl. But city dwellers shouldn’t get too smug about that. Just because an urban apartment uses fewer resources than a McMansion doesn’t always mean that its inhabitants use fewer resources than suburbanites.

This is the upshot of a remarkable 2007 analysis of consumption in Australia that I only learned about last week. My source of enlightenment was a not-very-convincing opinion piece by prominent anti-urbanists Joel Kotkin and Wendell Cox. Defending single-family zoning, they write: