On a lush carpet of lawn on the roof of Rockefeller Center yesterday morning, Mayor Bloomberg announced a big plan for making the city’s existing buildings more energy efficient. I was sitting in the scrum of City Hall reporters—an innately skeptical, jocular bunch—trying really hard to keep my cool, because what was going on up on the stage was truly as exciting a moment as I’ve ever had covering green buildings.
Here's how I described it to Amy Eddings on All Things Considered yesterday: mp3
What’s so thrilling about ventilation systems and lighting controls, two of the things mentioned? Scale. There is nothing boutique-y about this. The “Greener, Greater, Buildings Plan” isn’t a flagship park restroom with waterless urinals, or a solar-powered garage for the city’s fleet of hybrid cars. It's not even a new green skyscraper. This is a big-bore, all-city move which—if you come face to face with the significance of global warming—is as important a change in the built city as is going to happen in the next 15 years. It breaks down like this: 80 percent of the city’s greenhouse gas emissions come from buildings, and about 20 percent from transportation. (In most cities those numbers are reversed). And 85 percent of NYC’s buildings will be in use for the next 20 years—so no matter how many beautiful new green towers we build, for a long time coming they’ll still just be responsible for a drop in the bucket of the city’s total emissions. Yet PlaNYC, the city’s visionary, relatively unsung, long-term environmental strategy, calls for a 30 percent reduction in carbon emissions by 2030. (The consensus is we need a 50 percent reduction globally by 2050 to squeak out our survival.) The “Greener, Greater, Buildings Plan” is designed to provide a five percent reduction by 2022—which makes it the single biggest line item in all of PlaNYC. It’s as if we’ve been sweeping the house with a toothbrush and yesterday they decided to buy a vacuum cleaner. (Or rather, that building owners should.) Driving home the point that an initiative of this scale in a city of this size was big news, both the executive director of the Sierra Club and the president of the Environmental Defense Fund—the two most prominent national environmental organizations—were up there at the podium with Mayor Bloomberg. On Earth Day morning, they could have been wearing waders and cleaning out streams in some suburb. But yesterday they were in the spectacular forest of midtown skyscrapers, talking about the ho-hum subject of retrofitting existing buildings. That’s the change that will define the city in the next decades.
