This sounds like the "We Should Improve Society Somewhat" meme.
"I want to be more eco-friendly." "And yet you do things that are not eco-friendly. I am very intelligent."
Your 0km friend must be particularly ignorant as to not realize that his coffee, his wine, his beer, his meat, his flour, his electricity, his phone, his clothes, and so on, are not made in the same place where he lives. This is highly a-typical - nothing to base an argument on.
The localvores I've heard about use the phrase "Marco Polo exception" to allow 'anything your average 13th century explorer might have brought back from distant lands. So: pepper, and turmeric, and even the odd knob of ginger root stayed in the larder.'
> living on private cars in vast Rivieras do pollute GLOBALLY much LESS
Citation needed.
Single-family homes are more expensive per person than shared buildings. You have higher heating bills because you have no common walls with others.
You have worse economy of scale in your water, sewage, power supply, and internet and phone service provider. Or, if you have your own well, or septic system, you have to spend more time to maintain it.
You must dedicate more room to storage or spend more time resource planning - if a light bulb burns out, I can walk to the store to buy a replacement while you either go without for a while, or you store more extras than I do, or you keep better track of your bulbs than I do. (The same applies for every consumable: batteries, toothpaste, tape, etc.)
You have to drive to visit the doctor, dentist, barber, and so on, while I can walk or take shared mass transit with frequent service. Assuming you have older kids, they need to travel school and visit friends.
Even the road to your house is more expensive to maintain than one in a city, which adds to your carbon footprint.
But even that is hand-waving on my part. So, to the literature! Here are snippets from three papers I found:
] Studies using the consumer's carbon footprint method usually reveal only small differences, either in favour off or against emission savings in cities. What are the reasons for the balance to shift in one or the other direction? This article, based on Germany, points to higher emissions in rural areas, while our own follow-up study on Bavaria shows the opposite: higher emissions in cities (Gill and Schubert, under review). - https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S092180091...
] In Eastern Europe, carbon footprints ... increase clearly with the increasing degree of urbanisation. By contrast, in some Western European countries, such as France and
Belgium, carbon footprints clearly decrease with the increasing degree of urbanisation, even when income is controlled. Overall in the studied countries, carbon footprints are 7% lower in cities than in rural areas when income and household characteristics are controlled. However, this is compensated by the 6% higher average income in cities. - https://iopscience.iop.org/article/10.1088/1748-9326/ab443d/...
Looks like the research evidence is that rural populations like where you live do NOT "pollute GLOBALLY much LESS" than urban populations like where you used to live.
That's a bit complex for an HN reply but anyway in general the key of density is "not too much, not too little". Modern cities are in the "way too much" level, some countrysides in the "way too low" level, Rivieras are the today mean IMVHO. Witch means enough dense to have a certain economy of scale, a certain sustainability of services, but not too much so they are able to evolve.
Let's take the example you do on "an apartment need less energy" because being stacked ..., that's true, in theory. In practice, at least here in UE, most apartments tend to be mean-old buildings, grown up quickly in some economic boom where energy costs was not something anyone care. You can't insulate effectively such buildings, you can do something at a high price for little results. While single-family homes are mixed, some are old, some are new and almost ALL can be rebuilt without absurd issues. Tall buildings can't: they are too dense, they are build in places where it's not allowed to build for good reasons (like some social housing of the '60s build one after another on a steep hill and a single crappy road to access all etc). So essentially they can only remain in they sorry state until they collapse or get demolished anyway.
How much they have cost in structures? Because a light 2 flat home it's a thing, a 12+ flat building it's another. How much big settlements have altered local climate to the point that any cities have it's own proper microbial signature, natural water system alterations etc? Spread settlements source water locally, so they do alter a bit, but not at a city scale, they pollute locally, but again not at a city scale. An example I found is http://www.newgeography.com/content/006840-high-density-and-... but you do not need real measurement it suffice to think how nature work and how humans can or can't integrate with it.
In a spread Riviera you still get a doctor nearby, because the density is enough, but you only get small buildings intermixed with nature. Yes, you need to travel, but you do not need expensive and invasive road infra, bridges, tunnels, metro etc just simple roads with some animal passages here and there, the soil is still permeable almost everywhere and so on.
In evolutionary terms: classic deliveries from on-line retail? No issues: just replace your mailbox with a small package home and that's done. Drones delivery? No issues. There is plenty of space. Just change the package delivery to offer an aerial access. Future flying cars? No issues. Just sacrifice a small area of your garden to create the lending place. You have room for p.v., to store water, ... since you can be A BIT autonomous any "service issues" from electricity grid to water supply it's not so urgent to fix and so on.
Long story short: economy of scale works when PRODUCER are nearby, since now in cities almost no one produce anything, there are just services and resellers in cities there is no more an economy of scale. Since WFH have issues but works and issues can be solved well, or at least mitigated with a bit of time, most westerns cities who are tertiary sector workers place have anyway no reasons to exists anymore. Transition it's not cheap, but in ALL CASES will happen because as I said before cities can't evolve and we evolve. As the time passes buildings reach their EOLs and rebuild them it's next to impossible or simply an absurd effort. There will be and already there is no room to move anymore, tied to crappy public transportation systems who are not sustainable if more effective and so on.
If we try at a slow peace it will hurt much less but try to deny that stating it's possible to keep building cities "but modern one", modern today, obsolete tomorrow, with the same issue is as hypocritical as my friend...
Umm, I gave citations which show your claim that "living on private cars in vast Rivieras do pollute GLOBALLY much LESS" needs much more solid support than your personal views which you have just repeated.
These included examples from Germany (where different regions had different urban/rural balance) and France (where rural had more CO2 emissions).
> you do not need expensive and invasive road infra
Do you have evidence for that? You need, what, 100 meter of street per house? And you are, what, one person? While 100 meter for an urban street is indeed more expensive in linear terms, but can support hundreds of people.
> Drones delivery? No issues. There is plenty of space. .... Future flying cars?
Flight is energy intensive. Either you have heavy batteries (making the flight even more expensive) or you've got hydrocarbons, which currently means fossil fuel.
Batched ground transport is more fuel efficient. It only costs, what, about 1 EUR to get a letter delivered to your door? But you only get that once per day, and not every day.
The Rivieras had horse-drawn delivery before vehicles so you only need a few horsepower to get around. Ground-based vehicles emit less pollution, operate in a wide range of weather, and have safer failure modes.
> You have room for p.v., to store water
My point is that this means you don't have any cost sharing with your neighbors. Each house needs enough to cover its peak use, and likely each person need to know how to maintain the local equipment, and have the tools for the additional maintenance.
One city water tower is more effective than the same amount of individual cisterns.
> since now in cities almost no one produce anything,
As a software developer, I would produce exactly the same amount in the countryside as I would in the city.
Actually, probably less because I would have more to maintain the house.
> most westerns cities who are tertiary sector workers place have anyway no reasons to exists anymore
You do know that many people like to be in the city for easy access to restaurants, clothes shopping, the library, clubs, socializing with friends, lectures, political demonstrations, parades, churches, festivals, and more, right?
I personally hate taking care of a lawn, and I get cabin fever working from home.
> tied to crappy public transportation systems who are not sustainable
It's not like wide-scale ownership of personal automobiles is sustainable either. I mean, your lifestyle requires two cars. What happens if, due to age or illness, you no longer have the physical ability to drive? What do you do then?
> These included examples from Germany (where different regions had different urban/rural balance) and France (where rural had more CO2 emissions).
Not to being rude but such computations are not science, are just game based on arbitrary assumptions... A "TCO of pollution" need a damn large model who simulate all people consumption traced to their sources, counting relevant processes in between + simulate different theoretically realistic arrangements changing some parameters. AFAIK no such models exists probably simply because it's not much in fashion reasoning in global terms instead of focusing on single specific aspects and perhaps it's so long and complex that most fear anyone can spot small errors practically not really important, but weaponized to discredit the whole design...
> Do you have evidence for that? You need, what, 100 meter of street per house?
A simple empirical evidence: do a large Riviera need many simple roads or big dorsals? I mean why we need a big highway? Typically to connect a dense area to another because many people and goods travel from some "hub" (in network theory speaking) while a almost-hub-less network do need more small links to traverse it from anywhere to anywhere. Now if you agree with that try to imaging how impacting is building such expensive highways vs small roads. Not much in absolute terms (like how many rocks, asphalt etc you need) but in relative terms of local impact on climate and nature.
It's the same for a fully watertight city area vs a sparse urbanized one: both roads are watertight, but in a city there is a very large watertight surface who push water in few directions, in the riviera water goes everywhere so you do not get much "river" effect that alter local water system. Similarly for small roads you do not need to destroy entire mountains, create giant infra that alter local wind and so on.
> Flight is energy intensive. Either you have heavy batteries (making the flight even more expensive) or you've got hydrocarbons, which currently means fossil fuel.
Sure, so far, BUT that's anyway our path for various reasons, climate and social change included who need to move people and so having "movable infra", something not doable with roads or rails but doable by air and water. Also we have to compute the cost of vehicle + it's use vs crafting a whole road/rail etc infra and keeping it up. Again it's a damn complex model but it's not a new idea that by air is almost at the same cost even if we can't move anything by air... It's not me but
https://www.easa.europa.eu/sites/default/files/dfu/uam-full-... who claim that's the future. They claim for urban mobility but I think that's definitively crazy, while it's perfectly doable in a large riviera, and I doubt McKinsey do not have though that...
> Batched ground transport is more fuel efficient.
That's theoretically true, practically false: public transports are efficient when are a bit loaded, but to be effective they need to operate 24/7/365 witch means OR they accept to be far less efficient than private transports MOST of the time or they simply run only for efficient usages and so people need anyway a private transport and having both is still less efficient that using only one. Even in Swiss, to cite a fresh article: https://www.thelocal.ch/20230109/opinion-trains-in-switzerla...
> My point is that this means you don't have any cost sharing with your neighbors. Each house needs enough to cover its peak use, and likely each person need to know how to maintain the local equipment, and have the tools for the additional maintenance.
That's another classic problem, still unsolved. In the recent past for instance teleheating was sold as and eco-friendly cheap and simple way: you get hot water from some industry cooling systems who need to push heat out and you are happy. Now those who choose that path cry that their heating prices have skyrocketed... Similarly nowadays in UE homes are FAR cheaper than apartments in operational expense terms. The issue essentially is "if we are all smart and fair anything is simpler sharing stuff", but the big if tend to be valid for limited period of time...
The city water tower is a good example: in theory individual homes get water and have nothing but keep up normal home pipes. Nice. In practice it means that an accident on the system is a general emergency since anyone are without water. If you have a bit of reserve at home, EVERY HOME, than the emergency is far less urgent and so maintenance and design costs goes down. You do not need a hyper-quick team 24/7 ready to run, with anything needed immediately available for instance. For electricity it's the same: a spread Rivieras grid with homes capable of few hours autonomous power it's far less costly than a dense grid that must reduce downtime to the extreme. There is a storm and some transformers burn? Oh, no issue we will change them tomorrow vs push people in the middle of a stormy night with all they need to change it ASAP. We users do not feel those costs but they are still there.
> Actually, probably less because I would have more to maintain the house.
And how much time you save having cut the trip to the office ALL working days?
> You do know that many people like to be in the city for easy access to restaurants, clothes shopping, the library, clubs, socializing with friends, lectures, political demonstrations, parades, churches, festivals, and more, right?
Yes, BUT I know that if enough people flee the city those who want it can only keep it up alone, witch is a doomed to fail effort... BTW in terms of ease of access: try to move in a dense EU city and in a vast riviera... It's often easier do 100km in a riviera than 10 in a city. Personal experience...
> It's not like wide-scale ownership of personal automobiles is sustainable either. I mean, your lifestyle requires two cars. What happens if, due to age or illness, you no longer have the physical ability to drive? What do you do then?
That's a issue common everywhere: if we do not die young at a certain point we need help. But help in a riviera it's not much different than in a city, for instance it means having someone who gives you food, help you move etc, evolution is the answer: we are near self-driving cars, in the future even if not tomorrow, we will have them. In the future we will have likely much more automation that allow elders to remain autonomous for a larger timeframe of their life. Then... Than it's the same than today. At a certain point we can't live alone anymore. And that's why we have structure to help the elders, having them in a city or spread does just means having littler structures in nature instead of isolated concrete buildings where we can't almost see anything nice around...
However you are right stating that NOT EVERYBODY can afford certain homes, cars etc, and that's a problem I do not see solved by anyone. Those who claim goshiwong alike homes solve that tend to be some who want young and productive slaves, not anything else...
You've made an argument that rural living has lower CO2 emissions. How do you know that you are correct? Because of an intuitive feeling? You've just implied that your own statements are not backed by science, so why should anyone believe you? And I've given equally valid handwaving arguments for why your proposition is wrong.
> Sure, so far, BUT
That's the way physics works. We've had roads for thousands of years. They can be built with manual labor and horses. Flight is energetically more expensive, and only justifiable if road construction is very expensive. Eg, we nearly always use ferries rather than planes to cross smaller bodies of water.
You already need roads, and that need isn't going away. People still need to visit the doctor, dentist, barber, etc. You want trash pickup, and probably want fire service and ambulance access. You probably want a septic truck to visit to pump out your septic system. The recent pandemic shows that education-from-home doesn't work well. Someone may need to visit a dialysis clinic three times a week. And all those workers need to get to their places of employment. Hence, there will be roads, making ground delivery cheaper than air.
> That's theoretically true, practically false: public transports are efficient when are a bit loaded
In what you replied to, I was talking about delivery transport, not public transport.
In any case, of course mass transit needs to be "a bit loaded" - you aren't going to run one person per bus or train.
And in "OR they accept to be far less efficient than private transports MOST of the time" you need to define what "efficient" means. You have two cars, which you rarely use. Figure you replace a car every 10 years, for 40K EUR, that's 4K/year in depreciation. Plus maintenance, insurance, power/fuel, new tires. Perhaps 5K/year? And a bit more since you have two cars.
Checking now, a year card for all of London is £4008. In Berlin, a fare zone ABC card costs €107/month or €1284 per year. And people do live in London and Berlin without a car.
Personally owned cars are not cost effective when measured that way.
Yes, there are definite advantages to cars. But this article is about promoting more alternatives to cars, not getting rid of cars.
Note too that heat production and pollution controls are effective with district heating than each household providing its own heat, and still likely cheaper than electric heat.
> more small links to traverse it from anywhere to anywhere
Congratulations. By getting rid of highways you've just greatly increased your supply chain costs for everything because all cargo trucks now take 2-3x longer. And you'll be running trucks at lower capacity and/or doing a lot of trans-shipping to supply all those people.
> If you have a bit of reserve at home, EVERY HOME, than the emergency is far less urgent and so maintenance and design costs goes down.
That reserve costs money. Centralization reduces the overall cost, even including paying for "a hyper-quick team 24/7 ready to run".
> It's often easier do 100km in a riviera than 10 in a city. Personal experience
Ahem. I'm from the US. I know people who commuted 125km each way for work. And I've been in the rush hour traffic in Los Angeles. But that's neither here nor there. 100km of car traffic is much more polluting than 10km on an e-bike.
> And how much time you save having cut the trip to the office ALL working days?
Your argument is predicated on rural workers working from home. People can also work from home in the city.
I already work from home, living in the city. Though really, I work from the local library, the local college, a cafe, at the park (if the weather is good), etc. Like I said, I get cabin fever staying at home all the time with no one nearby.
> if enough people flee the city
We had that happen in the US. "White flight", as white Americans took advantage of racist government subsidizes to move to the suburbs.
The result is not financially sustainable. Providing roads and utility services is much more expensive for these homes than in older, more compact urban residential areas because it requires more material per capita.
Furthermore, the Baby Boomers are getting old. More and more of them will be able to drive. They'll need alternatives to having a car.
> But help in a riviera it's not much different than in a city, for instance it means having someone who gives you food
I should have assumed a car-centered person like you would assume the only two options are "be able to drive a car" and "have someone [who can drive] help you."
In a more compact area, with a mix of services, other options include: walk (including with cane or mobility walker), bike, e-bike, tricycle (for those with balance issues), golf carts, moped cars/micro cars, scooters, mobility scooters, and of course public transit.
These can let someone maintain their independence for a long time, even without a car. But they are more effective in urban areas with mixed planning than in spread-out rural areas.
I think it's time for a small recap: I'm not talking in CO₂ terms but in pollution terms. The actual fashion of carbon score etc is an economical and political move, not something tangible and scientific.
In such terms I state that in a spread living we can have a spread economy as well. Witch means we need to move LESS goods around the world for less distance. For instance where I am (French Alps) it's a good climate for trouts farming, chicken farming, production of lentils, chickpeas, potatoes, ... NOT that much but enough if we are in a de-centralized economy to nourish A BIT the resident population. Oh yes it's not enough. But it allow to move significant less merchandise thanks to that small fraction. We can't make shrimps, we can't make enough milk for butter, cream, cheese and direct milk to drink but in a de-centralized economical model it's economically sound develop as much as possible such local resources and so the fraction of long-haul food logistics we need it far reduced. Similarly in single-family homes there is room to stock foods AND the interest of doing it witch means a lot less packaging and so less logistics for them. For instance instead of buying sooo many bottles per year I buy oil in 5 or 10 liters jar, I drop the oil in small oil cruets for normal usage. Similar for wine/beer/vinegar. Instead of buying small individually packed cheeses I buy large ones and freeze all I can freeze, stock in the fridge those who can last few MONTHS and so on. Summing this allow to pollute LESS than being concentrated in small areas and small buildings. USA suburbs are too dense and only residential to be sustainable, a Rivieras is a place where homes are not one attached to another and only residential but a mix of residential and commercial small buildings with enough space around for nature.
So no, I do not makes an error giving up large highways. Certain goods will be more expensive, favoring a local-first economy. Diversification is pushed instead of being massacred so we have our MAIN source of innovation and strength.
That's is. Beside that: do you think tall buildings in cities are eternal? Did you try to imaging how to rebuild them when they'll be EOL? Try just to compute such costs.
I suppose you agree we need economy of scale: where is now economy of scale? We have megafactories, factory-states, consumer-states, ZERO economy of scale ANYWHERE. We do not have real innovation anymore, just popularisation and improvements of existing tech/new use of old tech. We have reached evolutive limits in most areas. What's the future you imaging?
> I'm not talking in CO₂ terms but in pollution terms.
The topic was "If we all cycled like the Dutch, global emissions would drop 700M tonnes".
Some forms of pollution are more critical than others.
> it's economically sound develop as much as possible such local resources and so the fraction of long-haul food logistics we need it far reduced
We had such an economy. Turns out canal and then rail are far more efficient at moving goods than roads. So much so that canal and then rail hubs became important towns and cities.
Cheap fossil fuels then made road transport more economical, allowing suburban and exurban sprawl, like what you enjoy.
> I buy large ones and freeze all I can freeze
You know that people who live in the city can do that too, right? We keep bulk foods in our basement storage, where it's dark and cool.
In the US, Latter Day Saints ("Mormons") believe they should have a three months to a year of food in storage, and many Mormons live in Salt Lake City.
> do you think tall buildings in cities are eternal
"Tall buildings" is a common misdirection by people who don't like cities. "Tall" can be 5 stories, like the one I live in, or it can be 100 stories, like a skyscraper.
No buildings are eternal, including rural ones. Tearing down and building a new 5 story building with 20 apartments is not hard. Likely cheaper than tearing down and re-building 20 free-standing houses. Have you computed the costs?
And a lot of people live in urban areas in detached houses, and "with a mix of residential and commercial small buildings with enough space around for nature."
> ZERO economy of scale ANYWHERE
I can't see how anyone with a basic sense of production history can make that claim.
Even on a physical level, big cargo ships are much cheaper per ton-mile than smaller ones. That's why we have 20,000 TEU+ container ships.
> Some forms of pollution are more critical than others.
Definitively not CO₂... It was chosen just because we can lower it, while we can't with other pollutant...
> We had such an economy. Turns out canal and then rail are far more efficient at moving goods than roads. So much so that canal and then rail hubs became important towns and cities.
That's a VERY interesting point: back then being in a certain place means live better than some other places, so people concentrate. Now? Allow me to quote a little bit more talking about stocking foods, yes it's possible everywhere there is room to store. In dense European cities there is no room for significant storage, the more a building is newer the less space it offer. We start to see people looking for OLD buildings to have more room just to WFH in hybrid (absurd) setups. And that's pose another issue: in dense EU cities there is no room to evolve. Try Google StreetView in some cities of the center and south. How can you rebuild a building without road access (YES, in some large EU cities some "poor housing" was built in the '60s with ONLY stairs to access on the side of a hill with a single road, lately they added some lift, but still NO ROAD nor no room to make one). How can you even plan to demolish a building where such activity demand to relocate 100+ people and blocks few roads FOR MONTHS in places so dense that there is no alternative path or there are very few and obscene?
I do not know enough USA average situation but in center and south EU cities are dead, there is no way to evolve them behind relocating their resident and rebuild them from scratch a thing so expensive nobody even imaging it, and since relocation is needed anyway better to build something without such horrid evolution problem.
Now on economy of scale: what's produced these days in cities? In EU and I bet also in USA on average almost NOTHING. IN the past cities was the place where all artisans go, so where there is competition, and the innovation, low price and specialization. Now only few giants produce, all the rest resell their goods directly or use their machines to produce something with the raw materials the giants supply. We have reached the point of having restaurants without kitchens, they got a different menu per day, packed often pre-heated food on time, they just serve it. We have dishwashers of some vendors made to "work best with our dishes" and so on. That's why I say there is no more economy of scale.
> Even on a physical level, big cargo ships are much cheaper per ton-mile than smaller ones. That's why we have 20,000 TEU+ container ships.
Sure they are cheaper, but they are JUST A PART of a logistic chain. They are cheaper IF there is a mass production, mass shipping, mass unloading in a restricted area. Actually such cheapness is unsustainable. Did you remember the "panic" where the Ever giver stranded in the suez Canal? In IT terms the name is SPOF.
The idea of the world as a factory, just-in-time productions etc have proven to be cheap WHEN ANYTHING GOES WELL, and a damn disaster when anything break even a little bit. A civilization can't take such risk. That's why we see back in fashion the self-sufficient model, witch alone can't work either, NK Juche policy as a good example. Ancient Roman's have a proverb in medio stat virtus (in the mean lie the virtue), witch means we can't be self-sufficient, and we can't be all specialized in a just-in-time giant factory. We can't be in the contryside nor in city. We need a mean way, that's the Riviera model.
"I want to be more eco-friendly." "And yet you do things that are not eco-friendly. I am very intelligent."
Your 0km friend must be particularly ignorant as to not realize that his coffee, his wine, his beer, his meat, his flour, his electricity, his phone, his clothes, and so on, are not made in the same place where he lives. This is highly a-typical - nothing to base an argument on.
The localvores I've heard about use the phrase "Marco Polo exception" to allow 'anything your average 13th century explorer might have brought back from distant lands. So: pepper, and turmeric, and even the odd knob of ginger root stayed in the larder.'
> living on private cars in vast Rivieras do pollute GLOBALLY much LESS
Citation needed.
Single-family homes are more expensive per person than shared buildings. You have higher heating bills because you have no common walls with others.
You have worse economy of scale in your water, sewage, power supply, and internet and phone service provider. Or, if you have your own well, or septic system, you have to spend more time to maintain it.
You must dedicate more room to storage or spend more time resource planning - if a light bulb burns out, I can walk to the store to buy a replacement while you either go without for a while, or you store more extras than I do, or you keep better track of your bulbs than I do. (The same applies for every consumable: batteries, toothpaste, tape, etc.)
You have to drive to visit the doctor, dentist, barber, and so on, while I can walk or take shared mass transit with frequent service. Assuming you have older kids, they need to travel school and visit friends.
Even the road to your house is more expensive to maintain than one in a city, which adds to your carbon footprint.
But even that is hand-waving on my part. So, to the literature! Here are snippets from three papers I found:
] Studies using the consumer's carbon footprint method usually reveal only small differences, either in favour off or against emission savings in cities. What are the reasons for the balance to shift in one or the other direction? This article, based on Germany, points to higher emissions in rural areas, while our own follow-up study on Bavaria shows the opposite: higher emissions in cities (Gill and Schubert, under review). - https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S092180091...
] Predominantly urban households contribute to about 650 kgCO2 e/cap less on average compared to their rural counterparts on the regional level of data aggregation. https://iopscience.iop.org/article/10.1088/1748-9326/aa6da9/...
] In Eastern Europe, carbon footprints ... increase clearly with the increasing degree of urbanisation. By contrast, in some Western European countries, such as France and Belgium, carbon footprints clearly decrease with the increasing degree of urbanisation, even when income is controlled. Overall in the studied countries, carbon footprints are 7% lower in cities than in rural areas when income and household characteristics are controlled. However, this is compensated by the 6% higher average income in cities. - https://iopscience.iop.org/article/10.1088/1748-9326/ab443d/...
Looks like the research evidence is that rural populations like where you live do NOT "pollute GLOBALLY much LESS" than urban populations like where you used to live.