Yes, Halloween is for kids, but the National Retail Federation has issued a warning: Expect to see plenty of adults dressed as Barbie this year 🎀

Grown-ups are “kidadulting” — buying toys and dressing up to rekindle childhood joy around Halloween.

Unsurprisingly, companies are profiting off the desire for nostalgia as adults expand the Halloween market.

Today, we'll discuss the sustainable cities of the future, and more, in just 4 minutes to read.

— Matthew

QUOTE OF THE DAY

"It took a long time to get ahead. I will say, in retrospect, I’m glad it took so long because it was interesting."

— Charlie Munger

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WHAT ELSE WE’RE INTO

📺 WATCH: The race for semiconductor supremacy

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📖 READ: Paul Graham’s new essay on superlinear returns and risk

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THE PATH TO A CLIMATE-FRIENDLY CITY

Solutions through cities

What does the city of the future look like?

How leaders design and revive our cities will likely determine whether we hit our climate goals. But making greener cities could also save lives, as more than eight million people die yearly due to fossil fuel air pollution.

Improving our cities is particularly timely as the climate changes and people flock to urban areas. By 2050, about 70% of the global population will live in cities, up from roughly 50% today.

Cities are responsible for over 75% of greenhouse gas emissions, which makes many policymakers and energy analysts believe that designing more sustainable cities is the most pressing challenge in mitigating climate change.

“If we can understand that cities are part of nature — even if they don’t really look like nature — that means we’ve got to change how we plan with them, how we work with them, and what our future looks like on spaceship Earth,” said Adrian McGregor, who is also an adjunct professor at the University of Canberra.

Lessons from Copenhagen

To understand how to make progress, it helps to zero in on a case study: Copenhagen, one of the greenest cities worldwide. That’s not a superficial title or greenwashing statement from the mayor — it’s rooted in the concrete microdecisions that city leaders have made to set an example for others to follow.

Copenhagen wants to eliminate all its emissions and be net zero, creating more renewable energy by the day and emitting less energy overall, particularly anything related to coal, oil, and gas.

Electric vehicles go a long way, and Copenhagen has plenty of EVs. But not driving goes even further. More than half of residents bike regularly after the city poured about $300 million into bike infrastructure, cutting down carbon emissions.

They also cleaned the harbor, making it swimmable, complementing their green spaces and urban gardens. They have a power plant that turns waste into energy. They came to rely on one of the world’s largest district heating systems, which captures leftover heat from electricity production and then delivers that heat to homes across the city.

Each solution alone doesn’t put much of a dent in the problem. But taken together, they create a model city. That’s important because national or regional policymaking can be challenging. Cities are local enough, as Andrew Simms of the think-tank New Weather Institute says.

“Cities are more agile than nations. They can learn and quickly copy best practices from each other, they are less hidebound by bigger geopolitical considerations at the national level, and they often have considerable autonomy over key sectors like transport and, to a different and variable degree, housing.

“They are also good at sharing effective solutions and enable a huge amount of experimentation with policies and infrastructure, at multiple scales, before solutions get rolled out at a regional and national level,” he adds. 

The materials

As global temperatures rise, our cities are adding heat. Stroll through a major city like New York during the summer and you can feel the heat worsened by the concrete sidewalks and steel buildings.

Nearly all of those buildings rely on air conditioners that pump for most of the day. That reliance on AC will only expand: By 2050, two-thirds of the world population will have AC, requiring new electricity capacity equivalent to the U.S., Europe, and Japan combined.

Then there are the materials. The very sources that contributed to cities’ success must be replaced. Green cities are moving away from brick — the global brickmaking industry contributes about 2.7% of the world’s carbon emissions — and cement, which accounts for about 8% of global emissions. (If the cement industry were a country, it would be the third-largest emitter in the world, behind only China and the U.S.)

Steel production, meanwhile, pumps about 9% of global emissions annually. But it’s a key material as we construct climate-conscious cities, prompting many analysts to call for more recycled steel (and timber).

More green

Cities worldwide grapple with cost-effective ways to electrify transportation and create more sustainable systems. More urban green spaces and trees, wider streets, bike lanes, and lower, energy-efficient buildings all help. (Green spaces can also influence surrounding areas, aka the urban space cooling effect.)

In Greece, Athens wants to use part of its ancient underground aqueduct to revive 20 wells in the city, irrigating new green spaces as summers get hotter in the Mediterranean. In France, new legislation means most parking garages must be covered by solar panels. In New Mexico, Albuquerque became one of the first US cities to eradicate fares for bus and metro trips in the city.

Other models worth emulating include Medellín, Colombia, which shortened commutes with cable cars, and China’s Liuzhou Forest City, the first forest city in the world.

Reducing the cost and raising the quality of public transport is one of the easiest and quickest ways to reduce carbon emissions. It’s a classic example of how shifting incentives can drive change.

The stakes

The heightened demand for green energy systems has created an entirely new marketplace of creativity and innovation, from solar companies to producers of recycled building materials.

Cities occupy only 2% of our land, but they create about 70% of global waste and 80% of world energy, according to the United Nations. They are the biggest consumers of water, energy, and natural resources, mainly because they house most people.

If there’s a silver lining, it’s that on a per-capita basis, cities emit less than lower-density areas, like the typical American suburb. Shared resources and public transport are a starting point.

The next step is trusting entrepreneurs to continue creating cutting-edge technologies to power our world as efficiently as possible.

“We know how to fix this,” environmentalist Al Gore said this summer, the hottest on record. “We have the means to solve it.”

Dive deeper

For more, here’s a video breakdown of some of today’s greenest cities.

See you next time!

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