Here's an interesting bit of news to digest: According to Mayor Bloomberg, who was recently questioned during one his green-initiative openings, "In heavily mass transit–dependent New York, 80 percent of carbon emissions comes from buildings and only 20 percent from vehicles." That's an amazing fact.
However, isn't it interesting that in PlaNYC, his plan to create a greener New York, the mayor has presented the idea of "congestion pricing" for automobile and other motorized methods of transportation in New York without addressing the other four-fifths of the problem that creates carbon emissions in the city?
For an executive praised for his creativity, Bloomberg is not focusing on the larger part of the picture. The mayor who has famously rid the restaurants of cigarettes and trans-fats can do better than this.
To be fair, his plan includes provisions for reducing energy consumption and greenhouse gas emissions in city-owned buildings and operations by 30 percent over the next 10 years, but he hasn’t addressed privately held buildings, which represent a much greater percentage of the city’s carbon contribution. Why not give private building owners a break on property taxes for bringing carbon emissions down for either new or retrofitted buildings? In other words, owners and managers of commercial and multifamily buildings need economic incentives to continue the small amount of growth heretofore seen in the green building movement.
I believe Mayor Bloomberg has the passion to bring change and has the strong desire to make New York City green. However, unless he addresses the bigger piece of the puzzle, he's not going to come close to accomplishing his dream.
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