Bloomberg’s Hidden Environmental legacy: Climate Change and the Future of New York City, by Katherine Bagley and Maria Galucci, 2014, e-book, $3, InsideClimateNews.org
by Moisha Blechman
One million more people will live in New York City by 2030.
Think of what this means. One million more New Yorkers who will use our already crowded subways, buses, schools, and hospitals. Ballooning energy consumption which will vastly increase greenhouse emissions, poisoning the air and the atmosphere. Storm water pollution and piling garbage would overwhelm New York City’s already fragile resources and quality of life.
This is the nightmare scenario that was handed to Mayor Bloomberg in 2005 by the city’s demographers. The mayor immediately understood the consequences and they galvanized him. He saw it as a challenge requiring huge, possibly revolutionary ideas.
This remarkable story is told in a new e-book, Bloomberg’s Hidden Environmental Legacy: Climate Change and the Future of New York City, the little known story of how the mayor assembled an elite group of experts fully aware of the city’s grave problems. He motivated them to devise a realistic and workable plan for the future, PlaNYC. It has become famous internationally as a big-city initiative for a sustainable big city life in a changing climate.
At first his big question was how the city would provide the same quality of life to a million more people. Bloomberg created the Office of Long-Term Planning. It quickly morphed into the Office of Long- Term Planning and Sustainability. That change indicated the direction the whole project would follow. As the members of the “Office” found another big problem to address, another “office,” “task force” or “board” was created for in-depth study. The next one was the Sustainability Advisory Board and soon included the Climate Change Adaption-Task Force.
The mayor knew that radical change will meet with measure-killing resistance from the city council and affected portions of the public. This is why he insisted on in-depth research. Bloomberg and his various teams worked under the assumption that to innovate city-wide changes, they needed sound science. They believed in the persuasive energy of facts. The project teams were deeply committed to their mission, striving to make their presentations as bullet-proof as possible. Strict deadlines for this agenda resulted in a pressure cooker work environment.
While the subject of the book is Bloomberg’s environmental legacy, authors Katherine Bagley and Maria Galucci make it clear that the people working on the project gave up their personal lives to create a road-map for a challenged New York City. As the authors demonstrate, altruism can still excite talented people to heroic sacrifices.
Population growth was not the only motivator for fundamental change. Bloomberg had long been sensitive to what climate change implies for a city with 520 miles of coastline. This is why the impacts of global warming are intrinsic to sustainability planning. How sustainable is New York City when the sea level is rising every year, even as the land mass itself is sinking? Bloomberg had long been aware that sustain- ability includes rethinking zoning and building codes. It means planning for the huge costs of storm recovery and adaptation. In fact, it means rethinking every aspect of city life.
In 2006 Bloomberg said that “the reality of climate change is incontrovertible, and the responsibility of all of us to address this is undeniable.” He set up a scientific group headed by Rosenzwig and Solecki from NASA to provide the latest scientific research. Others were charged with creating an inventory to track the city’s greenhouse emissions with the words “if you can’t measure it, you can’t fix it.” The inventory revealed that almost 75 percent of emissions came from heating, cooling, powering and lighting buildings. The remaining 25% came from transportation.
At first, PlaNYC identified 127 projects reflecting ten sustainability goals and projects. Some of them included planting one million trees, painting roofs white or silver to reflect heat into space, turning asphalt playgrounds into grass and tree playgrounds, low-energy light bulbs in building corridors, heating efficiency, congestion pricing for midtown traffic, converting cabs to hybrid fuels and relocating electrical equipment above storm water flooding. Bloomberg established a Green Codes Task Force for new construction.
At the same time Bloomberg pushed for a national carbon tax: “We have to stop ignoring the laws of economics.” “As long as polluting is free, it will continue.” In May of 2008, the City Council made the Office of Long-Term Planing and Sustainability a permanent fixture in the NYC government. This is very positive, but its future agenda still depends on the next administration.
Superstorm Sandy arrived in October, 2012, and proved the City’s vulnerability. After Sandy’s devastation was analyzed, it was found that the restored dunes, wetlands and, in fact, all the natural areas, fared much better than developed ones. “Nature must be a central component of the response to threats,” Bloomberg said. “Natural solutions are more effective than built solutions, and encourage wildlife besides.”
At the same time that Bagley and Galucci highlight Bloomberg’s commitment to the climate change problem and his repeated very intelligent statements on the issue, they also mention his determination to develop the city’s 520 miles of coastline, much of it old wetlands. He is quoted as saying: “We must protect it, not retreat from it.” This contradicts earlier statements: Bloomberg knows that retreat is the city’s best protection from flooding and storms.
Sandy did spur the Bloomberg teams to create a Special Initiative on Rebuilding and Resilience called SIRR. “In June 2013, Bloomberg unveiled a plan for a massive overhaul of New York’s transportation, energy, parks, building and insurance plans, as well as sweeping coastal protections.” SIRR included 257 initiatives spread across five boroughs, at a projected cost $19.5 billion, most of it from the federal government.
Anyone following climate change has noticed that the predictions concerning climate change repeatedly underestimate either the speed of change or the degree of change. With that in mind, look at the latest predictions from the city’s own Climate Panel, as quoted by the authors. (Thanks to Bloom-berg, that panel is still officially part of NYC government.)
By the 2020s, average temperatures will be three degrees warmer. By 2050, only 36 years in the future, temperatures will go from 18 days to 57 days above 90°F. By mid-century, one-quarter of the city will be in a flood plain. Heavily populated swaths of Brooklyn, Queens, and Staten Island will experience frequent and widespread flooding. New York’s sea level will rise twice the global average. By 2020 it is expected to rise between four and 11 inches. By 2050, sea level will rise 11 to 24 inches and could rise to 31. I would like to add that LaGuardia Airport is less than four feet above sea level on a good day. If you read a recent article by David Remnick in the New Yorker, you would be warned that when a Greenland ice sheet collapses, the sea level may rise by several meters in one year.
Considering the above, Philip Orton, physical oceanographer from the Stevens Institute in Hoboken, N.J., stated: “At some point we will have to abandon some areas. There will be no other choice.” In contrast to Bloomberg, “Governor Cuomo created a $400 million land-buying program that pays clusters of homeowners in the most vulnerable areas pre-Sandy values of their houses. These collections of houses will be torn down and the property left vacant to act as natural buffers for future storms. Hundreds of homeowners have applied.” I think we can call them the first Northeast climate refugees.
It seems obvious that, unless we can reverse climate change, New York City may have a future of gradual land abandonment. Sea level rise will not stop at almost three feet in 2050. The biggest problem I see for New York City is how the connective tissue of the city—the highways, bridges and tunnels—can survive, or even be redirected. Even Amtrak’s route up the Hudson River could be washed out in 40 years. Bagley and Galucci do not mention the consequences of a three-foot sea level rise or if SIRR has looked that far into the future.
Bloomberg’s Hidden Environmental Legacy is primarily a well deserved appreciation. Although the authors mention a few criticisms, they do not comment on them. It is certainly true that the changes Bloomberg instituted fit with a dynamic city. The pedestrian plazas he created keep cars out of midtown even though he could not get congestion pricing from Albany. It almost does the same thing. The Citi Bike initiative is useful and lifts the spirits of the population. Biking is fun. The million trees initiative is popular with everyone.
However, the book restricts itself to PlaNYC and SIRR, not Bloomberg’s entire environmental legacy. I asked four active Sierra Club members who live in New York City their opinion of Bloomberg’s legacy beyond PlaNYC. New York is complex and has many issues of environmental importance. How does he rate? Their responses were very careful.
They admire PlaNYC, yet they all mentioned Brooklyn’s Gowanus Canal. It’s the 14th most toxic site in the United States and continues to pollute waterways. It may even be dangerous to touch it!
Yet Bloomberg bitterly fought its designation by the EPA as a Superfund site. It was designated eventually, and a cleanup will be attempted. But the Bloomberg administration has already given permits for an apartment building only 30 feet from the canal.
Bloomberg put in place an unheard of concept that parks must pay for themselves. This resulted in giving public parkland to developers.
Bloomberg supports ongoing operation of the aging Indian Point nuclear power plant, a persistent threat to the city and its water supply.
He supported the Spectra pipeline for natural gas between New Jersey and Greenwich Village. In general, he is a big supporter of natural gas, especially to replace coal, even though natural gas is devastating everywhere it is mined. Natural gas is still a fossil fuel. Between fracking and burning, there is nothing clean about it. These are just some examples of the negative side of his environmentalism. Finally, three of the four gave Bloomberg a score: mixed.
My personal impression is that Bloomberg cannot resist a green light for New York real estate. Although I believe he is genuinely committed to his initiatives, Bagley and Galucci note that the mayor knew how important PlaNYC and SIRR was “to the city’s long-term economic development.” Deep within his being, Bloomberg is still a business man. That may explain what seems like a contradictory environmental record.
Moisha Blechman chairs the Chapter’s Publications and Climate Crisis committees.