Protecting the environment is one of the defining issues of the 21st century, with the United Nations estimating that the global community has just five years left to cut emissions enough to avoid catastrophic climate change.
While it’s easy for environmentally-minded individuals to feel cynical or hopeless about the prospect of preventing climate change, many scientists argue that it’s important to remember that humans do have the ability to improve our planet’s health.
“Optimism gives us hope and audacity to go out and make change,” chemist Dick Co told Yale Climate Connections in 2022. “I don’t feel it helps me to look back at the last 100 years and go, ‘Well, we shouldn’t have done that.’ But now we know better about the impacts of that on climate, so we can do better.”
Across the United States, individuals, organizations, businesses, and governments are all taking steps to ensure a greener future.
“There are plenty of things that individuals can do to adopt a green lifestyle, from recycling to sharing rides to installing solar panels on their homes,” Chip Lupo, an analyst at the consumer finance site WalletHub, said in a statement. “However, living in one of the greenest cities can make it even easier to care for the environment, due to sustainable laws and policies, access to locally-grown produce and infrastructure that allows residents to use vehicles less often.”
The greenest cities, Lupo adds, also are better for your health due to their superior air and water quality.
WalletHub ranked the 100 largest cities in the U.S. based on their performance across four categories: environment, transportation, energy sources, and lifestyle and policy. The scores in each category were based on 28 metrics, including greenhouse-gas emissions per capita, accessibility of jobs by public transit, and the number of smart-energy policies and initiatives.
WalletHub pulled data for the analysis from an array of sources, including the Environmental Protection Agency, the Texas A&M Transportation Institute, and Texas A&M Transportation Institute.
Continue reading to learn more about the five greenest and five least-green cities in America.
