Originally published at: https://boingboing.net/2019/04/19/new-york-2140-for-realsies.html
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NYC adopts law targeting the handful of skyscrapers that are spiking the city’s carbon footprint
50,000 of the city’s biggest skyscrapers
50,000 skyscrapers seems like more than a “handful”. I had no idea there were that many skyscrapers in NYC.
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cut emissions by 40% by 2030 and 80% by 2050
That seems like a pretty unambitious deadline. 11 to 31 years? Does this run the risk of inevitably proving to be too little too late?
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It’s actually buildings over 25,000 ft^2. So calling a lot of them “skyscrapers” is a bit generous.
The linked article also claims that the exemptions are over 50% of those buildings. That was a claim of the real estate developer lobby, so it is definitely suspect but worth investigating further. Unfortunately, the article does not.
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I like that illustration! Anybody know who the artist is?
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although, to be fair, the sky does go all the way down.
But seriously, this is a great move, and I hope it gets lots of press. It boggles my mind that a city like NYC doesn’t have mandates for green roofing and updated heating and cooling infrastructure. I would hope that any fines collected would be used to subsidize the upgrading of exempted properties (if exempted for good reason).
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You mean that’s not a photograph of NYC circa 2019? Fake news! I’ve been duped again!
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New York State has the lowest per-capita carbon emissions of any US state - lower than California. This is primarily due to the effect of New York City. Like most large cities, it’s per-capita energy usage and carbon-emission is much, much smaller than a suburban or rural area of similar population. With mass transit replacing automobiles and high-rise apartments supplaning single-family homes surrounded by water- and chemical-soaked lawns, big cities are very resource-efficient places to live.
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Wiki shows 273 skyscrapers.
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“cut emissions… 80% by 2050”
Piece of cake, as many will occasionally be party submerged by that point.
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How about saving the Indian Point nuclear powerplant? It is useable for at least 20 more years and would save a massive amount of CO2.
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We could make a lot of change in carbon footprint, real fast, if we really committed to nuclear. No other low-carbon energy source has the same long deployment history or proven scale, and it’s among the safest options in terms of deaths-per-megawatt.
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Right. 237 skyscrapers and 6000 high rise buildings. Something’s off here
Are you sure it’s not that the vast majority of NY State is farmland?
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We could have, 20-40 years ago. Today we have neither the workforce nor the industrial establishment set up to do that, so “real fast” may no longer apply. I hope we do it anyway. I still have no idea how to arrange the PR so people start actually believing the real historical data, quantitative risk assessments, and so on.
That said… nowadays wind and solar are cheaper in most places, and faster to scale, for a variety of reasons. And for some reason beyond my understanding, most people I talk to still seem to think of all non-fossil fuel options as competing with each other, instead of all of them competing together against coal and gas.
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It’s the cover for Kim Stanley Robinson’s novel, New York 2140. I believe the artist is Stephan Martiniere.
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The urban rural split isn’t as clear cut as you would imagine and some studies have total per capita CO2 higher in rural areas than cities, though admittedly most put urban higher (basically all put suburban as the worst). A bigger thing for CO2 is the huge chunk of their power that comes from hydro and nuclear. https://www.eia.gov/state/analysis.php?sid=NY
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Big hands… the biggliest.
Do they use disproportionately more energy? I’m unclear how one fifty story building is worse than ten five story buildings
What happens when rents go up in the outer boroughs as companies expand outward to compensate?
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They always seem to do that right? With housing too. They are like “we’re gonna build 1000 more affordable housing units by 2030”, and I’m like, there’s more than that many people moving to NYC every year!
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