[rebuilder]

Do you have numbers on that? The last time I looked it up, over here at least, that wasn't really the case. It seemed that while people in cities use less energy on personal transportation and housing, they consume much more goods and services than people in rural areas.

[epistasis]

Services are usually extremely low carbon, and shifting consumption from goods to services is a form of "carbon degrowth" without economic degrowth. And a dollar spent on "good will typically have far far less environmental impact than cars, and inefficient heating/cooling of houses. It would take an absolutely massive amount of, say, clothes to match the amount of embodied carbon that goes into manufacturing even a single car. Or compare 35 $1000 high end new phones, at 79kg of emissions each [1], to the typical new car which has an average price of $35k. The iPhones are the CO2 equivalent of 16,000 miles driven in a 2017 Prius, excluding the carbon from the manufacture of the car.

It's really hard to spend money to catch up to the carbon emissions from fossil fuel activities like driving, heating, and flying.

[1] https://www.cnet.com/news/apple-iphone-x-environmental-repor...

P.S. See also this extensive map of carbon consumption per household that I posted in a different comment:

https://coolclimate.berkeley.edu/maps

[mannerheim]

Personal transportation and housing are precisely the source of most energy usage:

> "The average emissions in New York City are about 30 percent less than the U.S. average," said Dodman. "This is because the primary factors contributing to individuals' greenhouse gas emissions are their use of energy and transportation. New York City residents tend to have smaller dwellings than the average American, so their heating needs are less, and they are also more reliant on public transportation."

https://www.livescience.com/13772-city-slicker-country-bumpk...