What's The Rush?
June 08, 2020
By: Nancy Anderson, Ph.D.
It's spreading fast — the idea that rush hour on NYC mass transit has got to go for NYC to start up again and get back its mojo. Sounds right to me. But the end of rush hour means quickly moving the city in a direction never before conjured up even in utopian fever dreams. Here are eight ideas culled from the current buzz and my own feverish brain for reviving the city. Some could be relatively short term and could end when science finds a cure for COVID 19 and develops a universally accessible vaccine to prevent its future contagion. Other no more rush hour changes should be permanent because they will contribute to the end of auto dependency, clean up NYC's air, cut our carbon emissions and foster a city that doesn't rely on always-expensive and thus always-inequitable car ownership.
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Demand Accountability
December 10, 2019
By: Nancy Anderson, Ph.D.
Let's end 2019 with an existential downer. Climate Change Is Accelerating, Bringing World 'Dangerously Close' to Irreversible Change 1 was an alarming, but no longer shocking, New York Times front page headline on December 4. Don't blame the headline writer for the alarm, the column's content was just as bad. I've been immersed in climate change developments since Sallan opened its doors 15 years ago and have paid attention to climate change since hearing a James Hansen talk in the 1990's. Until recently, both climate science and media coverage, spotty though such coverage could be, told us the impacts of climate change would start rolling in mid-century, with 2100 as the time when the oppressive weight of these impacts were predicted to be felt. But all that's changed. Petteri Taalas, Secretary General of the UN World Meteorological Organization has bad tidings. Things are already getting worse. The climate crisis is upon us. Now.
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We're In The Money?
October 10, 2019
By: Nancy Anderson, Ph.D.
As with most things in life, climate-conscious investors ought to place a premium on assurances that they will get what they're paying for. But, for such investors, comprehensive and trusted information sources are not systematically available. While such resources are not the only things lacking in the struggle for a climate-sane planet — the need for ambitious, comprehensive and enforceable public policies comes immediately to mind — making climate-smart financial decisions have not yet emerged as the new normal.
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DEE-fense!
June 01, 2019
By: Nancy Anderson, Ph.D.
There's a new climate action kid on the block — the Renewable Energy Legal Defense Initiative. Born in 2019, its proud parents are the Sabin Center for Climate Change Law at Columbia University and the law firm Arnold & Porter. What are their hopes for this new project and why is it called a "Defense Initiative"?
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Climate Action Meets The Piecemeal Problem
February 04, 2019
By: Nancy Anderson, Ph.D.
Meeting NYC's legal mandate to cut its carbon footprint 80% by 2050 is a tall — and essential — order. While 2050 gets closer every day, the full suite of detailed policies, laws, regulations and market transformations needed to meet the 80x50 remain substantially incomplete. It's been a decade since the release of Mayor Bloomberg's Greener Greater Building Plan and the phased-in ban on burning heavy fuel oil for heating buildings has likely been the most effective carbon cutting tool to date, but that still leaves much to do that will entail complex political and technical effort.
I've written before about City Council bills that would require existing buildings to renovate and retrofit buildings to achieve levels of energy efficiency that 80x50 demands. As of this writing, another version of the bill, now designated Intro 1253, had lengthy hearings in December 2018 before the Committee on Environmental Protection, but how the many challenging technical, financial and residential tenant protection issues will be resolved is unknown. What is known is that retrofit decisions and deadlines, as well as the basic metrics for measuring building energy and carbon outputs have no off-the-shelf answers. They have to be discovered or invented and their specifics hammered out — or not. All that can be said with confidence is that the City will not meet its 80x50 goals unless the energy appetite of its built environment changes in big ways and this means both more efficient uses of fuel and electricity along with a shift to fuel and electricity sources that are zero, net-zero or ultra-low carbon.
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Rock Around The Sun
November 26, 2018
By: Nancy Anderson, Ph.D.
It's that time of year for looking back and peering ahead. But what would a theoretical physicist who specializes in quantum mechanics say about this predilection to see what's happening in terms of the passage of time, the before and after, the yesterday and tomorrow? The physicist might say "Bah, humbug!" More professionally, a citation could be made to entropy — commonly defined as "heat death" or an irreversible flow of heat from warmer objects to colder ones — as the only aspect of physics where before and after — or time as we non-physicists think of it — makes any sense.
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You Can Lead A Horse To Data…
August 14, 2018
By: Nancy Anderson, Ph.D.
Turning Data Into Action is a report on a mission. That mission is turning data about building energy use — submitted to New York City government by owners of large properties to comply with green building laws — into actions resulting in significant building energy savings. The report, issued by the Building Energy Exchange (BE-Ex), focuses on large multifamily buildings. It predicts, "Implementing recommended efficiency retrofits would immediately reduce multifamily energy use in NYC by 11% and have a simple payback of less than 6 years." and its target readership consists of, "Building decision makers, operators, contractors and policy makers."
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There Ought To Be A Law, Right?
May 23, 2018
By: Nancy Anderson, Ph.D.
Raising the level of energy performance in buildings old and new has been on New York City's climate action agenda for nearly a decade. While a crop of new Energy Star-rated, LEED-certified and Passive House-compliant buildings are up and occupied and voluntary energy performance upgrades or "retrofits", like the Empire State Building, have been undertaken and celebrated, signals that these "greener" buildings are part of a surge sufficient to make a big dent in the City's energy use and carbon footprint are hard to detect. Is this a problem baked into local property markets, policy design or political will?
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Show Us The Power
March 05, 2018
By: Nancy Anderson, Ph.D.
The only chance for New York City to meet its pledge to cut its carbon footprint 80% by 2050 is to make sure that its buildings and its transportation are powered without (much) fossil fuel. While we have a long way to go in a time frame that's short, there is a lot of creative ferment and public discussion about making new and old buildings alike proudly energy efficient, along with accelerating the introduction of electric vehicles, while throttling back on total car use and reviving the decrepit mass transit system. Calls to electrify everything abound and New York State's REV (Reforming the Energy Vision), gives pride of place to shifting the electric power supply model in the direction of Distributed Energy Resources that will rely on clean power sources like solar, wind, hydro and geothermal.
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The Science Guy And The Rest Of Us
November 15, 2017
By: Nancy Anderson, Ph.D.
This fall I saw "Bill Nye: Science Guy" a film that weaves several narrative strands together in an admiring but deeply disturbing documentary. The first strand follows Bill Nye from his days as the TV goofy science guy in a series aimed at young viewers, which aired from 1993–1998, to a well-respected educator and fearless spokesperson for climate change science. "Fearless"? Yes. He's appeared on Fox TV to cross swords with climate deniers like weather forecaster Joe Bastardi and engaged in public, in-person debates in less-than-receptive venues. The second strand is biographic.
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80x50 — Promises, Promises
July 11, 2017
By: Nancy Anderson, Ph.D.
At a June 2017 City Council meeting, the Environmental Protection Committee heard testimony from the de Blasio Administration and a host of environmentalists about a menu of new bills related to cutting the greenhouse gas emissions of buildings all around town. This hearing took place a decade after then-Mayor Bloomberg launched his Greener, Greater Building Plan. As such, consider it a marker for what New York has learned about the task of taking aggressive climate action, as well as what's been done to date and what it will take for meeting its legally set goal of cutting carbon emissions 80% by 2050. I'd like to say that effusive talk has led to demonstrable action, but I'm not sure I can.
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More Good Green Jobs For OneNYC
May 09, 2017
By: Nancy Anderson, Ph.D.
With a tip of the hat to Jane Austen, let me tweak her famous observation "It is a truth universally acknowledged, that a single man in possession of a good fortune, must be in want of a wife." Today, "It is a truth universally acknowledged that a liberal big city Mayor must be in want of good jobs for all." I can't vouch that Austen was comedy-free, but I do believe that Mayor de Blasio is earnest in his commitment to good jobs for all as part of his OneNYC mission.
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