Nancy Anderson, Ph.D.

Memories of Next Summer

Photos of fashionable women wrapped in shawls on steamy summer days in NYC make sense to me. They are prepared for cold offices, colder conference rooms and icy shops and subway cars. But if shawls were 2008’s hot weather trend, we’ve got a problem. The need to anticipate arctic conditions indoors is both weird and a sign of profound failure.

Equally odd in these energy-conscious times is a New York Times story on Con Ed’s efforts to build new electric substations around town to keep up with growing power demand. These substations don’t come cheap; a new facility in the Bronx cost $300 million to build and Con Ed has plans to spend $6 billion by 2017 for additional ones. How unfashionable! What will Con Ed spend by 2017 on reducing our demand for energy and improving the efficiency of the systems we have now? The article does not say. Instead, the Times focuses on how community opposition to hosting substations makes such construction difficult and more costly for the utility, but makes no mention of the City’s goal of cutting its carbon emissions 30% by 2030 or potential strategies to rein in energy demand to lower overall consumption and the inevitability of needing more substations. Today, news about our energy infrastructure shouldn’t read like an electric utility’s press release.

Today, we know about the perils of climate change and the sky-high cost of energy, but these stories demonstrate that in some important ways we’re still behaving as if it were a retro carbon-carefree era. The good news is that at the same time our thinking and our commitments are shifting to the realities right ahead of us. Since climate policy should be just as creative as fashion, let’s preview some of the hottest new ideas about urban sustainability.

SEQRA and Climate Change
A major consequence of the US Supreme Court decision in Massachusetts v. E.P.A. (127 S. Ct. 1438, April 2, 2007), holding that carbon dioxide is an air pollutant under the terms of the Clean Air Act, was to give states and cities a firmer basis for controlling this major contributor to global warming. Despite the EPA’s failure to promulgate CO2 emissions regulations, civic, professional and environmental activists have been developing far-reaching ideas for advancing climate policy and greenhouse gas rules at the sub-federal level.

New York’s Municipal Arts Society (MAS), with the input of a working group drawn from diverse expert arenas, is circulating a working draft of “SEQRA and Climate Change”. SEQRA is New York State’s decades-old environmental review statute. As a major tool for assessing the environmental impact of a wide array of proposed actions, inclusion of provisions for assessing the climate impact of a project’s greenhouse gas emissions makes good sense. “SEQRA and Climate Change” identifies the value of this kind of review in helping government agencies, project sponsors and the public to understand the climate consequences of a proposed action “and will help address future impacts related to the largest actions taken in New York State in the land-use, energy, industrial transportation and other sectors.” This working draft sets out a detailed framework for analyzing climate change in an environmental impact statement under SEQRA and it is compatible with the goals of PlaNYC 2030. As Mayor Bloomberg said when describing the impetus for his plan, “We soon realized that you can’t formulate a land use plan without thinking about transportation and you can’t think about transportation without thinking about air quality. You can’t think about air quality without thinking about energy and you certainly can’t think about energy – or any of this – without thinking about global warming”. This rightly puts land use and public policy front and center of State and City climate efforts.

It would not be a great stretch for the New York City’s own Environmental Quality Review law to adopt analogous requirements, nor would it be the first time in the U.S. that environmental reviews were expanded to incorporate climate impact considerations. The MAS report builds on leadership in Massachusetts, California, and Seattle Washington where analysis of climate impacts is a routine part of public review and approval. Presently, the MAS is circulating its report among experts, civic and political leaders, seeking their support for making this kind of analysis an integral part of State and City environmental reviews.

Greening the Zoning Resolution
Another venerable body of rules with a pervasive impact on urban land use and development -- which has climate ramifications that are just beginning to be considered -- is the New York City Zoning Resolution. It was last thoroughly overhauled in 1961; from a climate and environmental perspective, 1961 is pre-history. Now, attorneys from the City Bar Association's Land Use, Planning and Zoning Committee have convened a working group of architects, engineers, city planners, environmental attorneys and activists, as well as representatives from grass roots community groups to brainstorm and craft an idea menu for bringing the Zoning Resolution into the 21st
Century's climate change context. The menu of new zoning text ideas could range from the simple to the ambitious. The Committee will evaluate the workshop results and consider its next steps. 



The working group is divided into several topical sub-groups, including energy, transportation, air quality, climate change and water quality. For the energy committee, the value of green zoning is directly connected to meeting New York City's goal of cutting its carbon footprint 30% by the year 2030. Members are discussing an array of building envelope ideas such how to shrink a building's carbon footprint by influencing the allowable floor area, height, or other zoning-regulated building elements. The other sub-groups are considering how to use the zoning to reach PlaNYC’s other goals.

As with the Municipal Arts Society, the Bar Association’s initiative and engagement with formulating tools and strategies for combating climate change at the state and city level shows how public policy can be made and how to advance the education, understanding and buy in of broader publics. Forging ideas that are smart and effective enough to withstand the rough and tumble of the inevitable up-hill struggle to actually change the way we live and work is too important to be left to term-limited, distractible elected officials.

Green Codes Task Force
Although term limits are a reality for New York City politicians and the four-year election cycle is a fact of life for public office holders, of course there is plenty that can be done with the time that’s available. At the request of Mayor Bloomberg, the New York chapter of the US Green Building Council has kicked off a Green Codes Task Force. With architects, engineers, senior city government staff, attorneys, developers, environmentalists, unions and academics working on eight technical committees, the Task Force is currently reviewing the City’s construction codes, identify obstacles to high performance building and make 100 recommendations to encourage green practices in this industry. Its recommendations are due by the end of 2008. Stay tuned!

Green Jobs/Green Economy
All this green ferment could have stimulating and even long-lasting impacts on the local, regional and national labor market and economy. A report by the Political Economy Research Institute, University of Massachusetts identifies six “strategies” with significant potential for growth and good jobs and concludes that, “Millions of U.S. workers – across a wide range of occupations, states and income levels – will all benefit from the project of defeating global warming and transforming the United States into a green economy.” Green-collar job advocates like the NYC Apollo Alliance and the Center for Working Families are developing ideas to harness this ferment to growing a green-collar labor force for a green economy that will supply the right market opportunities in New York City. To this end, Apollo organized a green-collar jobs round table with over one hundred participants in June 2008; this was the first step in creating a workforce development plan to be launched early in 2009. In a similar vein, the Center for Working Families is rolling out a Green Jobs/Green Homes campaign that aims to create statewide green homes energy retrofit program and which would provide good paying jobs for New Yorkers.

Turning to the economic development side of this equation, the City’s Economic Development Corporation, carrying the torch of the Mayor’s PlaNYC aspirations, has issued a Request For Proposal for a consultant to analyze “the emerging landscape of the green sector {of the local economy} in order to support specific high priority segments that have a potential for increased economic impact.” Since, the deadline for submitting proposals is September, the final report should be out in 2009.

LEEDing On The Left Coast
Meanwhile, San Francisco now has one of the most ambitious high performance building laws in the nation. Raising the bar every year, by 2012 most residential and commercial construction will have to meet LEED Gold (or equivalent) standards. Applicants will have to comply with a city-approved checklist, which emphasizes energy efficiency and water conservation. With San Francisco’s goal of cutting its greenhouse gas emissions by 20% in ten years, this law will put the city in the climate combat fast lane. By the summer of 2009 could New York City become a contender for the mantle (or shawl) for having America’s most energy efficient buildings?

Looking at this field of hopeful ideas and fledgling initiatives, I’ve got my fingers crossed. Failure is not an option; by next summer we’ll start to see if we know what we should be doing and how we should be doing it. So too, we’ll start seeing if we can meet the test of mobilizing the agreement and the resources to act. If photos of women in shawls to protect them from icy blasts of summer air conditioning can be excused as just a fashion fad, consider what scientists see in store for New York City. According to the Columbia University climate research center, by 2080 average temperature could soar by eight degrees, rainfall increase by ten percent, and sea-level rise by a swamping 17.7 inches. Summer just won’t be the same, ever.

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